In Our Nature: Book One
by ninety6tears
Summary: When four members of the Enterprise become stranded in a mirror universe, they have to covertly abandon the Imperial fleet. They eventually settle in the fragile autonomy of a region populated by resistant Terrans and former slaves. K/U
1. Streets Are Uneven

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chapter 1

**streets are uneven**

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1 HOUR.

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Jim wakes up and he knows this kind of headache, the pinching slight throb at the back of his head, the same one he woke up with when he was planted in the cold on Delta Vega. He dares to move, finds his limbs strewn almost haphazardly on a sort of lounge chair.

Somebody's quarters. It doesn't take him long to figure it out. After a couple minutes he notices, with a sudden stretch of red across his thoughts, the chess set sitting on the table and it feels almost like he's being mocked. He doesn't know when it was now—thirty-six hours ago?—after talking to the Halkans, waiting to beam up, and like he always did while waiting in the couple idle seconds before they got pulled up, contemplating what he'd do when he got back. He and his first officer had been in the middle of a game when he'd taken off for the mission, a little too distracted by some misunderstanding or other to even give him so much as a "See you later," and when they were about to beam up, he thought, I am going to have chicken for dinner. I am going to finish that game, starting with going after Spock's hanging pawns at the back left...

He now stares dully, numbly, at the half-finished game set up on the office-style table until his listlessness is interrupted by the man sitting next to it.

"If you are recovered for the moment, we should discuss the wisest course of action for you and your companions." The Vulcan closed something he was working on. "You do not need to explain your predicament, for reasons I am sure you can deduce."

Jim sits up just a little, finally slowly indicating at his temple with one finger. "How long were you poking around in here, huh?" His voice is shockingly hoarse to himself.

"Long enough; forty-four seconds at the most."

Jim interrupts the rhythm of the explanation, just saying: "Sulu."

"You have significantly incapacitated the helmsman for a time, if that is the information you are requesting. Your doctor informed me shortly before you awoke."

Glaring at his surroundings and sluggishly shifting up higher in the chair, Jim realizes the slow dizzy churning in his brain, the fact that he feels like there is some panic attempting to rear back up in him that can't quite claw onto anything. "Did you give me something?"

"You are under the effects of a light sedative," Spock says, at length explaining with a touch of derision, "I did not want to risk you becoming animated again upon waking."

"So you got me stoned." Jim is realizing more every second his unease with himself, remembering everything that happened, letting his eyes stray down to his knuckles. He sees streaks of dried red and knows his clothes probably have blood on them too, mostly not his own. Everything is blaring harshly into his vision; he keeps his head still as if to avoid letting too much of it get in. "How kind of you."

Spock folds his hands together on the desk in front of them. "It is important that you successfully impose yourself as the other James Kirk at the present time. The former captain would not seem prone to violent outbursts rather than more controlled forms of disciplining other officers."

His request for clarification is delayed, half-apathetic. "So Sulu's in a position to be disciplined?"

"While there is only subjective evidence that he was attempting some kind of indirect mutiny, sabotage or temporary disabling of a function as critical as the transporter pad certainly calls for severe penalties," Spock explains, like that should be obvious, and it probably should be.

Jim hasn't looked directly at this man who is not Spock ever since he awoke, can't seem to do so now before he finally flatly asks, "What happened?"

"Sulu, among others, became privy to the strange alterations that Scotty was making to the ship's functions; being singularly focused on an opportunity to usurp the captain, he simply took note that you were attempting some private venture with the transporter in the middle of an ionic interference; as I'm sure you know, there are several ways to tamper with a transporter signal to extend a small margin of error to a lethal one, and in such conditions a mere amateur can do so very easily."

The confirmation feels redundant: He was trying to kill Jim. And if Scotty hadn't gotten that awful dawning expression and checked the logs to discover that a certain helmsman had no business at all being in the transporter room only four minutes before their window of escape was supposed to seal up, he probably would have succeeded.

It was a couple minutes in which they could have taken a gamble, hopped blind into a transporter beam and prayed a thousand prayers they'd come out on the other end.

Instead Jim gripped back on the reaction and any of the sudden fire coming into his features and said, "Nobody's doing that," before he left in a haze of a straight line to go give Sulu a piece or two of his reaction.

At least he knows now that they were right.

He finally braves a check at the chronometer. It's been just a little over an hour since Spock had to pinch him out. With a collapsing feeling he gets the first wave of dread about facing the others, knowing how inexcusable it is that he wasn't able to be there when they got the final story.

"Where are my..." He isn't even sure what to call them. "I need to...check on my friends."

As he's standing up, he barely even glances at Spock, but he does halt in hesitation, shoves his hands in his pockets and walks over to the tri-D chess set.

"He was white?" Jim asks, doesn't even wait for an answer before his bitterly tinged voice adds, "His strategy's messy."

Spock blinks, looking at the set, looking either perplexed or hesitant before he comments, "He was a formidable opponent. When his mind was not on other things."

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In sick bay, Bones runs it down for him in more detail.

"Somehow he's got two fractured ribs on one side, one on the other. Broken nose, significant contusions all over his abdominal region, but those are getting fixed up. The concussion is the most serious, but it's treatable. He's put under for neuro treatment. Shouldn't be up, maybe not even conscious, for a couple days..."

McCoy crosses his arms and leans into the wall at the somewhat secluded back area of medical, his voice trailing off from his need to sort of robotically keep talking. Jim meets his eyes, both of them stuck in a steely, sticky mess of everything they're not saying.

Jim says, "I beat the shit out of him."

"I don't know if I wouldn't have done the same thing," McCoy says quietly, not seeming sure whether he's really in need of any reassurance.

"It's like I barely even remember doing it." Jim lets out a note of a short scoff. "You're _treating_him."

"...Wasn't very hard to just imagine he was somebody else."

Jim sinks his back lower against the wall. He finally explains, "Cat's still in the bag even though the commander knows. He's granting us a few weeks' amnesty to figure out what the hell we're going to do, so it looks like we have to keep playing along for a while..."

"You got any ideas?" Bones asks.

Lips pressed together, Jim shakes his head. "All I've thought about is how much I need to go talk to these people and convince them to surrender. You know, Spock was supposed to assassinate me if I don't comply with nuking the hell out of them."

"Christ," Scotty mutters. He's sitting with his legs up on one of the biobeds and Jim is absolutely sure he's never seen him be this quiet before.

"Jim," McCoy says in a slow change of angle. "...I think I need you to run this down for me."

Jim lets out a sharp breath, looking to Scotty, and the engineer seems to come out of the dark funk for the purpose of rambling off some meandering technical explanation to Bones. The doctor stands with his hands loose over his hips, eventually crossing his arms and maintaining a defensive confusion.

"We lost our constant," Scotty finally paraphrases. "Theoretically, yeah, we could recreate the conditions and get torn through some other ion storm, but there's no way to control where we'd end up, or if we'd even come out in one piece. Hell, even the existence of universes this closely connected was only theoretical until...until _now_. Who's to say there aren't about a thousand others we could end up in? You want to take a gamble we end up somewhere even worse than here, if we're lucky enough to surv—"

"Right, but..."

"For fuck sakes, Bones, we're not gonna spell it out for you," Jim snaps harshly. But apparently he is going to, because he says, "We can't go back."

The silence then is deafening and cold, lasting through the moment when Nurse Chapel appears in a vision of neon eyeshadow around unexplainably unfamiliar eyes, slapping some records down for McCoy and mumbling, "I'm off."

The nurse's pale hair and tall legs disappear, and after another moment Jim looks up from the floor and around, between Scotty and McCoy.

"Where is she?"

The other two just give each other blank eyes.

"...Nobody knows where she is?"

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The door is unlocked and slips open automatically at Uhura's quarters, allowing Jim's hesitant entrance. After a couple seconds of looking around he sees the light on in the bathroom, then hears some movement at his own approach.

She appears almost like some animal simply ambulating out of hiding at the sound of a person entering, hair slick and dripping in ink lines down her neck and shoulders, and the carpet drooling under her feet from the endless map of wet roads all down her body. For some flick of seconds Jim is just staring as if slapped stupid by the sad fact of a something rather than a someone in front of him, the vacant expression somehow swallowing him up. It finally possesses him that he should be looking at the ceiling.

"Lieutenant." She doesn't move as he fumbles to remember how to talk. "—I mean. Are you going to maybe get a _towel_, or..."

Finally he perceives her moving around him. In a moment she's gotten into a bathrobe without drying off and is sitting down at her desk, crossing her arms, her face pressed into something wrongly calm.

He slowly takes a seat across from her and begins to explain everything he had to tell Scotty and Bones. All the while she just occasionally nods in understanding with her mouthed closed tight.

Finally he says, "I'm going back down to that planet tomorrow. I could...use your help, if you were willing to come. But I can't make you, obviously, since—"

"That would be fine," she says. "Sir."

Her fingers lace together and squeeze at each other in their idle long lines stretched upon the desk surface. Jim finds himself staring at them, at her, looking for something. Finally he stands up, feels like it's completely wrong to simply leave and aimlessly begins, "Uhura..."

"I'm—" she interrupts, but the sentence gets away from her. She clicks the nails of one hand on the table and the other hand comes up over her mouth for a second. She says, "I'm going to bed."

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Some of the less bravely stubborn Halkans plead in broken Standard for Jim to promise them mercy. They say they'll be slaves, they say they'll do anything, but they don't want to die. He has a feeling they were more adamant in their refusal to cooperate the last time they saw his face, but seeing him come down to speak with them again maybe loosens them into fragile hope. Or maybe it just wasn't explained to them clearly enough that they were all going to be dead if they didn't hand over the information on where they were mining all their dilithium.

"I can't—There's nothing I can do about that, but—" Jim taps his thumb against something, thinking, thinking. "I can try to organize a shipment of food supplies here in the near future. My first officer said something about some infected crops?..."

One of the Halkan leaders is still putting that together a few seconds later, and cultural body language differences aside, Jim's hardly ever seen anyone look so cynical. "You want to trade with us?" he slowly clarifies.

As soon as Jim is alone with Uhura, he asks, "You think they believed me?"

She looks every bit like a bored schoolgirl when she sets down what she's looking up on a PADD and looks over at him. "I think they're very afraid of going hungry. Is it advisable to make false promises?"

"When the alternative is blowing the place up, yes," he replies, catches himself doing something pretty close to staring at the way she goes back to what she's reading without a warm care in the world.

Spock is either furious or impressed when he finds out what Jim did, he can't quite tell.

"_Negotiations_," Spock says it like it's a swear word (and Jim finds he literally cannot look this man in the eye, it makes his skin crawl), "are not what enforces our influence over these races."

"Influence. Where the _fuck_ am I?" Jim is shouting now, kicking a chair against the wall in the first officer's cabin. "Your influence to do _what_? Blow up a tenth of the population? And all the knowledge and the resources that come with them?"

"It is theoretically imperative to the power of the Terran Empire that we maintain absolute terror, as far and wide from us as possible."

"Okay, but what about their lives?...Putting aside how often you all go beating up each other, how often does somebody, some member of another race that you've pissed off decide to come in and pick off some T.E.'s?"

"Within the last twelve months there have been sixty-three casualties as a result of external assault."

"I'd been serving as a captain for a year now," Jim quickly rebukes, "and that's about triple our casualty number."

"It is three hundred and fifteen percent your number, to be more precise," Spock admits.

Jim is confused for a few seconds, but slowly comes closer to the Vulcan as he figures it out.

"Excuse me," Jim snaps bitterly, "but you were extracting _statistics_from me during the meld?"

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"I think I really hate that man," Jim declares while he's kicking off his boots, lunges all of his fury against the wall by throwing the left one at it.

"Less than two days ago you described him as...What was it? A paragon of integrity?"

"I did not use the word 'paragon,' I was being relative, and oh yeah, that was _two days ago_, Bones."

Jim's friend eyes him with a very tired worry. "This place is fucked up, Jim. That's it. It's just...It's fucked. You gonna try to fix a whole universe by screamin' at it?"

Every morning he gets up and thinks that day will be better. And he believes it, until the dismal blankness of everyone on the ship invades any mockery of familiarity he once had with the same blueprint of a home. It's not so hard fitting in now, with the suppressed rage creeping in on them. Jim spends every hour trying to stymie his way to the quieter avenues of bargaining or acceptance, falls back on anger nearly every time.

They speak to no one else unless they have to, but there's no ignoring that everything and everywhere seems sick. It feels like the water is dirty and the air isn't pure and their skin is all they have left. With everything outside of them so tainted and gruesome, it gives them the urge to seal themselves off, let nothing in, because the only way to change anymore is the wrong way.

He assigns Uhura or McCoy to as many away missions with him as he can, so he can get away with being the nice guy. There are a few people they approach from planet to planet who are deathly afraid of them, who don't understand when they don't harm and even sometimes help them, but he just quietly leaves them with what little favors the ship's resources can provide. This, and the others, they are literally the only things he is living for.

Uhura appears completely unaffected by it all, as involved in his pursuits as if she was just some bodyguard, usually watching with crossed arms while he takes care of everything. It's almost more frustrating that she's as competent as ever when she needs to play along. If at any time Jim attempts some gesture of camaraderie or consolation, like a hand on her shoulder to tell her it's fine when she can't make out the slightly different dialects, she seems to avoid the contact without even thinking about it.

He's pretty sure it's personal, that there's some brusque explanation for that he'd have to really want some trouble to actually ask her about, takes it personally, just leaves it alone. They were just becoming friends recently, and now it's all let go. He has the sour unshakable notion that she thinks nothing could be lonelier now than letting him in.

When they're on Cardassia, occupied by the Empire of course, it becomes pretty clear to Jim that none of the planets they frequently hit on the journey back home are going to look the same at all; everywhere that's been conquered is policed by Terran marines. Children give him wary, frightened respect when they see him in the roads. Something about it makes him want to snap, but McCoy's looking around uptown and there's Uhura looking un-awake and empty and he has nothing to bounce off of. So when she doesn't speak up loud enough in response to one of his questions he pulls her to a corner and gives her a shouting reprimand, half genuine and half pretend and all the kind of bullshit that happens when he's actually getting a little terrified.

But even though her face falls a bit as if in realization of something, nothing dissolves. Her reply is so quiet he can barely hear it.

"I know what you're trying to do." She softly shakes her head. "Just leave me alone."

He's tried everything he knows to cough some life out of her, but she peels away from every possible approach. Every day she pulls in on herself even tighter like if she lets anything touch her she'll have none of herself left.

Jim can't say he's doing much better, despite any appearances. He busily obsesses over the other three, but there are the long walks he takes through the emptiest parts of the ship, the too-long showers that leave him pruny and hollow. He's entering his quarters one night to see Bones sitting on his bed. The doctor is waiting for him with a full tray of food set out. Jim looks at it with disinterest before attempting to avoid him.

"Jim," McCoy says tiredly.

"I'm not hungry."

"Sit the fuck down." Bones shakes his head. "Always running around now. Who's takin' care of you?"

It's mainly because Bones is more like he always was when he's trying to keep him together that Jim makes himself malleable, sits down and pulls the tray stand forward. He puts a piece of broccoli in his mouth.

McCoy watches Jim slowly eat for a few minutes, trying to read his face. "She still isn't talking?"

"She's talking," he mumbles. "It's just that I've seen her upset, but not like this...I don't know her well enough to know how bad it is."

McCoy looks up and down the other man's bitter and constant worry, hesitant. "You know, maybe she just needs to work this out on her own."

"Is that your medical opinion? We should just give up on her?"

"My _opinion_is that Scotty wants to do this on his own, and you and I have got each other, and I don't know who or what she's got, but she's dealing with it. It's not like she's the only one sulking a hole into the floor, we're all pretty fucked up about it all—"

"—_Everyone is going to be okay_," Jim says evenly.

McCoy's hand drops to his knee. "Including you?"

"I'm..." Jim gives the slightest shake of his head, and suddenly half-sensically offers, "Today on the planet, one of the officers smacked the hell out of this teenager who he thought was trying to steal from us...All I did, all I could do, was basically give him a slap on the wrist for wasting our time."

"We're gonna figure something out," McCoy insists out of the air, and Jim sighs away from his food.

"If I was safe, back home, if I was in a better place and somebody asked me what I would do in this situation, I'd probably be an idealist. I'd say that I could...transform the system from the inside out," he says with a self-mocking, lofty gesture. "But there are only four of us."

The doctor shook his head. "You _cannot_start thinking that you have that kind of responsibility, Jim. You just can't."

"More like only three of us," Jim grimly mutters. "Uhura just...stared. Like she didn't even care."

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There is a cave where the two of them get lost.

Rational thinking tells him that there can't be any haunted science to this place. It's the people that are screwed up, not the atmosphere, the axes, the gravity. Evil cannot be everywhere.

But this. This is one fucking funhouse of a cave, with wind moaning and whistling at all the right times to echo some animal that isn't there, textures that stick out like claws. Everything gets pitch black, with a silence like the slow opening of a crocodile's jaw. One bend into where he swore there would be light and a way out, and he curses.

And he realizes in a moment, she isn't next to him.

She isn't next to him.

"Uhura?"

He starts to reach, starts searching. After a few minutes he starts to run. His body is grazing through the maze so roughly that it's like hands of rock batting him back and forth and back and forth and laughing as his shouting comes back only cyclical echoes. Everything just keeps getting emptier and after too long he loses any calculated sense of direction and starts to shiver in the cold, wonders if he's going mad, his hands reaching and reaching begging to touch just something besides rock. Tries to stop and get his bearings, but everything feels so misshapen, doesn't lend its arms to him, and yeah, this might as well be hell, this needing and not knowing what's next and knowing that nothing much else is waiting for him outside. If he ever gets out of the cave.

His search turns more meandering and clumsy, tripping over himself like a drunk; he starts to wonder, maybe he's been plunged through yet some other crack in all that thin fickleness, blinks through some hazy _deja vu_ of himself at five years old and some nightmare-storybook you love as a kid because there is just something scary about_voids_when you're so clean and new to existing. Maybe the entire world is this cavernous limbo; everyone he knows or has known is this feeling of hard sandy cold, their faces in his mind blotted into the same cruel smile, even Uhura, especially Uhura whose eyes have no light now as if they never did. She is a figment, abandoning him, never having been. He shouts anyway.

Her name, her name, her name again. Please. Nyota...

"Jim?"

At the same point when the meek call meets his ears, he sees a dimness and follows it and follows it, and it's most strangely like getting off the roller coaster and not realizing where you are in the theme park, the sudden spritz of light and people waving hello, because how did he get back to the entrance?

She's a grey outline that he grabs by the shoulders and moves closer to the mouth of the cave just to look at her, like he's afraid that her face is all swallowed up in the black. But she's Nyota Uhura, looking startled and speechless, and something is moving in her eyes like she's sorry and he can't take it anymore.

She makes a sound as if to ask what happened, what's wrong, when his arms come helpless and tight around her. Ends up forgetting not to let him and clutches him back.

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When Jim and Nyota get back, there is a tumult coming down in medical bay; they see a table blown over, test tubes bleeding their contents on the floor, and a general roaring of grief blows its bad wind from the connected office.

"What happened?" Jim demands.

"He looked himself up," Scotty explains. "His daughter's dead."

They're all lingering at the doorway and there's a grim exchange of looks before she's the one who teeters into motion, the first to brave any contact with the storm as she slowly gets the doctor to sit down. A minute later she's making shushing noises as she rests a wet rag against the back of his neck and he sets his arms down to his knees. It's an oddly maternal comfort but seems to help. "It's okay, she's okay," she keeps repeating. "She's just in her bed asleep at home, okay? She's fine."

As the panic looks to be dying down, Scotty manages a surprised look at Uhura, a look at Jim, a look between the two of them.

After the bland-faced nurses clear out for the night, the two of them sit against the wall in the little corridor that leads to the office, across from each other, tacit.

"Have you looked up your name?" Jim finally asks.

Scotty gives a bewildered shake of his head. "No. No, I don't imagine I'm going to...You know, I always had this two-quid coin? One of these antiques that's been in my family for years. My dad gave it to me when I was a kid. Been lookin' all over for it here. I haven't got it anywhere." His lips are pressed tightly together as he shakes his head. He mumbles, "It's all just royally fucked up, you know?"

Before Jim can possibly think of what to say to that the other two are coming out wearing similarly worn looks on their faces. She crosses her arms and sits down next to Jim.

McCoy leans against the wall with his hands in his pockets, and he's finally the one who asks. "So are we leaving?"

Some understanding eyes move in a slow swarm, all looking at Jim. He shakes his head.

"It's not up to me. It's not like that anymore."

She says quietly, "You're the one who has to bend over backwards to do the right thing every day we're out here..."

"Didn't know you were paying that much attention," he interrupts in more actual surprise than anything else, but then she looks sorry and he tries to soften his look at her.

"How much longer until you can't get out of all that without answering to the Empire?"

There is a sigh-long silence.

"I'm in a position to try to make things better," Jim puts in. "I don't know how I'm going to feel about abandoning that. But I think it's just a matter of time before I just tell myself I don't have a choice in the matter and end up doing something terrible. And these _people_..."

That is something they don't need to discuss. The familiar, horrible faces, the fact that even with a full understanding that they are not their crew, this is not their ship, it still hurts to leave. It scares them, but that seems exactly why they should be getting out.

Sulu is released from medical the next day; Bones worked enough on him that he looks fresh as a daisy, except for that sickly quality that's off about him, the carbon copy flaw like a misaligned tracing job of a man Jim saved from that bad dive, a man who returned the favor only a couple months later by shoving him out of the way of a fire line. After the first day or so, Jim started to feel increasingly astonished that he'd beaten a man to within a slippery margin of permanent damage, especially a man who looked exactly like Hikaru Sulu, and he's waiting for that instinctive compassion Bones had for him to well up in him somewhere. But he looks at the helmsman drawn up to his height in a suppressed twinge of defeat as he walks by Jim, every inch of him emanating vice, and all he sees is the cruelest mockery possible of somebody he used to know and he feels like he could do it all over again, and that scares the living crap out of him.

He and Spock butt heads again the day after; they've been ordered to come down on one of the outposts to mediate some disagreement over slave trading. Jim sends Uhura into one of the throngs of sick-looking Klingons, ends up pleading for an extra hour to see if they can try not to separate families, an hour Spock insists they don't have after appearing genuinely taken aback at the lieutenant's ease with talking to the slaves.

Spock comes the closest to actually threatening them than he has since he found out who they all were, as if it's just him being impatient to win the argument, and Jim ends up alone on a balcony above the marketplace kicking something over angrily. He's up there for a couple minutes before he hears the heavy steps slowing behind him.

Without looking behind him Jim eventually grumbles, "Go away, Commander."

"Kirk," Spock says evenly. "I've come to ask if there is anything you wish to tell me."

Jim kind of sighs down on his arms resting on the banister, which the other takes as acceptance of his presence and comes closer, almost joining him at the balcony ledge.

It's a couple minutes before Jim says, "We want out."

The commander seems to give a little nod, and Jim can feel his thoughts thickening, calculating.

"Can you do that?" he asks.

"It can be arranged. But you have probably surmised that you cannot simply walk out of the Empire, nor would it be advisable to reveal your identity to the public."

"Why?"

"Given that you and some of your companions are still intellectual assets, they will not be likely to sympathize with the fact that you are all used to living by a considerably different code. Particularly...," he pauses, "because they cannot fully understand that code. Not in the way that I do."

"You mean because you saw all that stuff in my head in a way they can't."

He nods, with a surprising amount of certainty. He seems hesitant to volunteer what he's about to say, but does it anyway, like he feels it's pertinent. "I am curious about what I saw."

"Yeah?" Jim asks, mostly dubious.

"I do not think you are capable of understanding the level at which an entire paradigm I have understood to be reliable has now been proved...fallible."

"Well, if you're going to be vague as hell..."

"You live by a very different definition of honor, one that defines the value of survival in a fundamentally different manner, one that puts you at a much higher risk of endangerment by other races, and of poverty, of dependence on others. Your people are weaker than any I've encountered, and yet..."

"We're alive."

"To put it simply," Spock concedes, as if he actually needed help describing what he's trying to say. "Thriving may be the better word."

"And that surprises you."

"It does not seem viable."

"Well. It is. Why are you telling me this?" Jim squints over at Spock. "Are you trying to convince me to stay? You actually think from how things have gone for the past week that we'd be any use to you?"

"If you do not believe you would be of any use," he slowly replies, "then you would not be of any use."

That seems to settle that.

"Do you miss them?" Jim asks suddenly. Because for some reason he needs to know. "...Just in a professional sense, do you wish they were still around?"

Spock actually needs a moment to think about the answer.

"No," he replies. "I am concerned about my security, but in terms of their performances aboard this vessel, I do not consider them irreplaceable. I do not regret their absence."

"...In a personal sense?"

Either because he's more sure of the answer, or because he's lying—and Jim has no idea which one he hopes is true—he answers more quickly this time. "No."

Jim meets back up with Scotty and Uhura, finding Nyota exhausted and angry to have realized she just spent over twenty minutes drilling false hope for a small measure of kindness into the morale of several families of Klingons.

He finds himself interrogating Spock on the prevailing politics of slavery when the away group, which conveniently consists of no one else who doesn't understand their actual identities, is heading out of the town.

"Generally speaking, the Terrans are not comfortable with simply appropriating weaker races into their ownership. Taking slaves for their families is more often a symbol of victory, the result of isolated conflicts rather than full-scale oppression of an entire planet. Much debate can often result in discussing whether a species we are newly engaged with should be implemented into the slave trade; if the race has committed acts of resistance or violence against the Empire, the first appearances of their enslavement among humans is often an introduction of their status as an enemy of the planet which the empire is capable of conquering by force."

"You say it's not the result of full-scale oppression, but any races that have been enslaved are at least under occupation of the fleet..."

"In the instances that the location or condition of their home world is accessible and fruitful to us, yes," Spock grants. "But for instance, the enslavement of Romulans began with the incident with Nero, not with any contact with their home world—"

"They've already enslaved Romulans."

"Some, yes."

"What about Vulcan?"

"Indeed, some altercations resulted in Vulcans being taken and bred as slaves on Terra, long before the planet's destruction. But in terms of whether a given slave is Romulan or Vulcan, the culture is already becoming obsolete among the new generation of slaves..."

Uhura trips on a stone, and Spock is the swiftest at reaching to stop her fall by a solid grasp on her arm. After being steadied and realizing it was him, she snatches her arm back.

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The staging of it is pretty straightforward: Spock informs them that there will be a most unfortunate shuttle accident on an upcoming mission on Telon, only it seems that everyone will assume that he intentionally marooned them there and won't much care. When he's seeing them off in the landing bay, he provides them with an emergency comm code that will be useful for getting them a transport back to Terra with somebody likely to believe any alibi, if Earth is where they wish to go. Spock even offers, "I will not pry into your plans, for it would be better if I do not know them; but I will advise you that while Terra is likely the safest place for you to remain anonymous and also unharmed, it may still be difficult for you. I have provided you with two phasers; it would be unwise to underestimate the fact that you may need them."

Jim examines with a distant, hollow confusion the brochure-specific instructions on where to go first, how they can remain anonymous until they settle somewhere, how much money they've been given (which isn't much but still seems kind, considering that it's irritatingly impossible for them to get into their own accounts without the hacking activity being detected and automatically hauling suspicion on their collective disappearing act). "Why would you do this for us?" he finally asks. "What's in it for you?"

"I gain nothing from it," he admits, gradually adding, "but it seems that more than anything my curiosity with all of you has persuaded me to be experimental."

"Well..." Jim looks more directly into the face of the man who is now captain of the ship with something closer to a familiarity than he's yet been able to bear. "I hope that you think about it for a while."

They all manage to convey some gratitude except for Nyota, who passes by Spock without a word and is the first to board the shuttle. Jim doesn't know why he's inclined to explain it.

"He and she were..." He winces at the thought of saying "involved." But the Vulcan looks at him with a minimal amount of interest in the fact, slow to somewhat quietly reply.

"...I believe I understand that an appropriate response among humans would be some encouragement to 'take care of her'?" It sounds like an obligatory, neutral reply, but Jim is awkwardly dumbfounded by what it resembles.

He even gives the only clumsily relevant response, "She doesn't want that."

"I do not see how it would be of my concern either way. Jim Kirk," the Vulcan says his name with some finality, and in the slight confusion with his own thoughts, his eyebrow goes up.

Jim crumbles in a little bit at the sight; he takes a long look at the face, with something distant and also very present in his own eyes, with the fact that he's not really looking at the man but at his body. He looks with something almost warm and familiar, and he reaches out to consternate the deep eyes even further with a touch at the shoulder. And Spock forms no protest as Kirk gives a kind of encouraging shake to him, Jim's brows rebelling sadly against the simplicity of it when he says, "Goodbye."

Jim turns and boards the shuttle, and while Scotty pilots them away, he doesn't bother watching the ship get smaller and smaller away in the tangle of space.

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Just as Jim decided at some point that the second Commander Spock is the kind of sad that doesn't know it's sadness, Earth is poor. The type of poor that doesn't realize it's sure as hell not rich.

"Here's the thing," Scotty explains the day they topple into Salt Lake City off of a crowded shuttle. "I was looking at a schematic for a CX-30, which exists, but a lot of the parts I didn't know from Eve, like, at some point they started making 'em differently. Everything I keep looking at, the problems I saw with the ol' ship, she was all busted like they'd cut corners when they made it. But that's not really the problem..."

"Slaves build them," Nyota guesses.

"Yeah. No love in the trade." Scotty confirms it in his snappy way of speaking fast about these things, but joylessly. "And there are whole developments of technologies, a lot of recent developments we had...back home, you know. They don't have them. Cause think about it, why, eh, bother with less manually-powered engine systems when you can just throw some servants into engineering? Their max warp is even lower than ours, did you notice that? And the fleet probably gets along with the best technology cause they don't rely on slaves out in space, to the point they're almost a separate...entity. Everything down here is about a hundred years behind. Just look at the vehicles they drive."

"Keep it down, man," McCoy warns, a little paranoid as they're garnering some looks in the shopping area they walked to.

At the moment their minds are mostly crowded up with a kind of disoriented catharsis that makes simple demands: shower, clothes, sleep. There's a surreal reduction to simplicity as they become just four people backpacking around town in jeans and jackets, a clean set of fake IDs (helped by some of Scotty and Jim's hacking work) burning holes in their pockets.

The first night they spend in a motel; some alarmed shriek heard from the street outside wakes up Jim in the middle of the night, unless it's Nyota coming in from the cool of the evening, the realization that she was out dawning in grey clarity as her figure appears in the room.

He sits up from where he's lying next to Bones and whispers a clumsily demanding "Where the hell did you go?"

She's still and faceless in the dark, then moves to undress for a shower without answering. She is not in the one bed when he wakes, and he thinks she didn't sleep at all.

She carries on her numb dance in such a way that it seems like some cunning escape from their situation rather than dull denial. She withdraws, resumes; he wonders if he'll just have to let her this time.

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Jim and Scotty are standing in line at a convenience booth for some health amenities the next day, and there's an unspoken confusion between them when they realize the woman in front of them has a pair of pointed ears, a reddish hair color making Jim guess she's of mixed birth with human or some other species, but it's impossible to say if she's Romulan or Vulcan.

It's Scotty who takes the first chance to point at his own wrist, and Jim looks back and quickly notices the slender black band strapped tight above her hand, a red eye of a light blinking ominously next to the skinny hand.

"Doesn't it remind you of those little torture gadgets they had on the ship?" Scotty whispers to him when the woman is placing an order from a list. "I bet you anything it's a tracking device with some kinda...disciplinary..."

"Yeah," Jim agrees, looking closer at the servant now, and then he sees under her sharply cropped hair the symbol branded crudely at the back of her neck. Hard to tell from a couple feet away, but it's shaped vaguely like a coat of arms.

It only takes an afternoon of poking through some news files for Jim to understand at least part of the likely reason Spock warned him about Terra. He asks the rest of them over breakfast if they've read up anything, and when he gets a few shakes of heads, he can only start after a silence with "We could be in trouble."

He shows them a list he found, and it doesn't matter what any of the names are, only what the list is. Bones is the first to demand where the hell he got it, to which Jim has to explain he risked the use of Kirk's security clearance to peek into the records. "Don't worry, I cleaned the access history."

"You're not gonna mess around with that again, are you?" Scotty asks, and it's strange but assuring being talked to like that, knowing that the rank boundaries are slipping down. "We could all be fucked the minute they realize any of the missing crew members apparently just booked it to Earth..."

"Yeah, yeah, but this was important."

"So what is it?" Uhura demands, squinting at the list as she's the last person to pick it up. Then in a moment just adds a terse "Hmm."

Essentially a privately maintained blacklist, entailing suspiciously "anti-Terran" actions monitored by international computer systems and civilian tip-offs, it passively singles out to be watched closely for potential arrest anyone who appears to oppose the Empire's regime.

Ever since some point beginning approximately fifty years ago, almost half of the actions recorded were related to forgoing or opposing the ownership of slaves.

"Well." Bones says, "Fuck."

"We're just travelers right now and our story is that we're doing so at our leisure for a period of a few months. Nothing too strange about that." Jim talks over making a drowsy swiping motion at his eyes. "And it looks like this list is hardly a dead end, it's just...point one on not making you look good if you do something to more actively piss off the officials."

"But we'd still be the exception to the rule wherever we went," Uhura tiredly interjects, already knowing where this is going. "And we can't afford to draw attention to ourselves."

At which point Scotty concedes with his own set of curse words.

They put a lazy lid on discussing it for a couple days, but they all know it's on their minds at the first café they sit in that has servants wiping and sweeping while employed humans do the courtesy work.

They're fairly isolated wherever they go that day due to the weather being lousy, and find themselves talking more flippantly about their situation in public.

"As far as our options go..."

"There's a reason it feels like we're outlaws on the lam, Jim."

"You think it's a good idea to just keep moving?" Jim replies with a lopsided grimace. "Bones, I've told you already, we have to stop somewhere or we won't be able to make a living, and—"

"Well, how much do we have? And I don't mean literally the amount, I'm asking for the math."

"There is no math. I can't begin to know how to calculate how much money we need, we don't know...if you'll be able to open up a clinic or something, and _where_...?"

"That's a start, though," Uhura interrupts. "McCoy, you're our best asset right now. But even if we do find somewhere, we'll probably end up pooling most of our money just into getting a big enough place—"

She trails off abruptly when a teenager, one of the servants with a more utilitarian bar code of a brand on the nape of her neck, comes by their table just to take up an empty glass, and Jim startles the rest of them by leaning right forward, whispering to her:

"Hey. Where can we go if we don't have slaves?"

The girl jolts back just a little, almost seeming to not understand, a dull shock seizing her expression. They all realize it's fear when she casts a sidelong cautious look.

Jim sits back as if to let it go, but then as if moving quickly out of her indecision, the girl then leans forward a little; they're all realizing after the bewildered look on Jim's face that she's doing something with the drawstring on his sweater. There's a stern shout from behind the front counter, and she snatches the glass up and walks away.

"What did she...?" Bones is asking, but Jim shakes his head to show he's as lost as they are.

All she did was tie the string into a knot.

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"Another water?"

Jim looks up from his forlorn examination of his empty cup, gives the bored-looking bartender a vacant smile. "No thanks, I think I'm headed out."

"Is that tall one your wife? Outside?"

Jim clears his throat. "Yeah." Continuing with an attempt at non-suspicious friendliness, converses, "We're heading into Texas."

"Yeah? Looking to buy some napes?" In response to Jim's momentary blank reaction, he shrugs. "You look like you're on the move to settle somewhere, I thought."

"You're right, actually, we've just come here from living in Wales for a while. I don't even know where to go for it..." Jim schools his expression, a cocked eyebrow lifting but probably only adding to his look of befuddled tiredness, and he has a pretty good guess what this conversation is about anyway.

"Well, if you like Vulcanoids, you can pretty much find them anywhere. Closer to California you find purer Vulcans, who pretty much anyone will tell you is the best you can get. You looking for domestic or hard labor?"

"...Kinda both."

"I used to stick by Klingon back when I was having the place built, but I don't have the steel to keep 'em in line anymore. Back home we just have the one Romulan boy. Buy them young enough and they'll grow up pretty polite and all."

He's too busy cleaning the wood to see how Jim's stare is affixed a bit acidly back at him. His face doesn't match his drawling reply. "Yeah, that's what most people tell me."

"Just, uh. You've probably heard it before, but seriously, kid. Don't mess around on the east coast."

That gives Jim enough pause that he doesn't formulate some false response. The man just interprets it as being unfazed.

"I mean it. People hear about what's going on there and think they can grab a phaser and go pick up some napes like it's a fucking pumpkin patch. But those slavers messing around the Carolinas...My sister's friend was doing that, and his partner got shot in the head when they went over there."

Jim's brow furrows, and he's sure it conveniently looks like sympathy. "That's rough."

"Horrifying. Of course people get to bitching that the fleet isn't intervening, but it's really not worth their time, considering. People just need to be less reckless, you know?"

Jim is already sliding off the barstool when the bartender looks back up at him.

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All they're doing is meandering across the country, sometimes just making it on foot through the anonymity of bustling towns as they practically unconsciously go a crooked path northeast as if responding to a gut desire to get on the opposite end of the continent from the Empire's headquarters. Jim doesn't mention anything that the bartender said until they're at one of their gritty impasses where nobody wants to say where they should go because nobody knows. It wasn't the first time somebody mentioned that they should buy a car, but a day ago Scotty had put down a padd from which he'd apparently been reading an encyclopedic mess about this and that engine or vehicle or compact drive, and declared that he knew which one they should buy.

It wasn't hard to figure out that Scotty was trying to skim up as many reusable parts as possible when the one they bought was a bulky station wagon type which McCoy wordlessly but positively appraised for all the equipment you could fit in the back if needed. They were in an odd place that day as Jim had to put on his brightest faces to charm the salesperson into the kind of deal you sign off on without conducting more than a rudimentary background check. The clever ruse of it felt like old times until Bones cracked a dry joke about how Jim could probably flirt their way into a nice neighborhood, only to realize that wasn't very funny.

Jim is the last to get into the car later, shuts the passenger door after him and immediately starts.

"So this is what we could do. We could buy a slave..."

A sighing sound of immediate protest in the back seat.

"We could buy slaves," he continues, "and just not work them."

"I don't like it, but what else could we do?" Scotty says with a tired shrug.

"The part that I don't understand," McCoy suddenly says as if he's been wanting to declare it for a while. "...The commander didn't make it sound like it would be nearly this commonplace."

"Right, but when you think about it, everything he said was only accounting for the Empire's role in all of it." Jim gets a squinting look from McCoy and adds, "Who knows, maybe things have changed since he's even been to Earth. I'm pretty sure that even if there was a time when it was cushioned by some kind of ideology, that all went out the window at some point after somebody somewhere realized that it wouldn't be _illegal_to privately capture and sell whoever they can nab off the streets."

"There still _is _the ideology," Uhura puts in, wiping a hand at her eyes. "Look, you think people are actually looking into where these people come from when they're buying them? They're probably all truly convinced that it's okay, they're owning hostile enemies of their people who tried to kill and rob their military and lost their battles and deserved what they got, and oh, 'The Empire takes such good care of us.' And why wouldn't the highest-ups capitalize on whatever system keeps the people happy without turning anybody's stomachs? It's disgusting that we aren't even _from_here and it's already becoming obvious what's going on."

After that there is a long silence, and then Jim suddenly asks, "Have any of you heard anything about the east coast?"

Bones narrows his eyes again. "Like what?"

"I don't know." This time he doesn't have any research pulled up. He's acting on a hunch and too much of a hope to see if it's nothing like he thinks it is, has an itching need for them to go see it for themselves. It's that he needs a voyage of some kind that badly, maybe. "But I think we should go there."


	2. Diaspora

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chapter 2

**diaspora**

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They get tired of the roads and stop for a couple weeks at a small rental house in Missouri, practically testing the waters of just settling somewhere. Bones is surprisingly the first to say it out loud, at his most drowsily depressed when they're walking back together from a corner store.

"Tell you what, man...Even if we could be safe anywhere around here." The doctor pauses and swallows as a man passes by jingling something boredly in his pocket. "I don't think I could stand being around these people for too long."

"And treating them?..."

"No, it ain't like that." Bones shakes his head, is quiet for a moment. "There was this surgeon at the hospital where I did my residency. Used to say, 'You have to care about everybody, or it's just a matter of time till you don't care about anybody.'"

"And if he's alive here, you think he'd say the same thing?...Can you really take that much responsibility?"

Bones knows Jim's mockery is more fond than cynical, but still stops at their front door when they get there to quietly retort, "You may not be a captain again, but I'm always gonna be a doctor."

"...I know that." Jim almost looks like he's forgotten that they're going somewhere, that he's holding groceries. That he's supposed to ignore everything he thinks that isn't what to do next.

Bones looks at him like he's sorry about what he's just said. "Jim..."

"We both know I'm never getting that back. It's just." Jim is back in motion holding two bags with one grasp to get the key card out of his pocket. "I don't know what I'd do if you weren't here."

He's through the door then without looking at Bones, and as if the presence of the rest of the house makes that moment suddenly pass, he mutters back to the previous problem.

"You know, maybe it's worse in the cities. We could just...you know, get a place, like..." He shrugs, knows it's kind of a pathetic suggestion. "Out in the country."

"As if that's what you want."

"Well, it's all fucking relative, isn't it?" That doesn't induce the reaction he intended, and in response to the intent look from McCoy, he sighs. "Yeah, you know me better than that."

"I hate to say it, but you might have to learn to sit still for once."

"Oh, nice euphemism," Jim says almost tersely as he tosses the key card onto the rickety kitchen table and dumps down the last grocery sack. He feels a sudden grip at his arm, and Bones is looking straight at him.

"Listen." He's talking quietly, like he doesn't want either of the others to hear. "I've been reading things about how they treat these people...You think I'm just numb about it? But you gotta accept maybe there's nothing we can do. How many times will I have to tell you this?"

Jim turns and snaps open a box of eggs, checking absently if any of them are cracked, closes the lid. Starts putting the food away with a shake of his head after he says, "I can't live here."

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They are all listed as missing rather than dead. Jim suspects, but doesn't know, that any news about it is riddled with personal anecdotes from friends and family and this is why he usually bends over backwards to avoid anything beyond the basic facts. They avoid updates about the T.E. as often as they can, but Jim does enough research to know that James Kirk was a triple felon who'd been slipping under the radar of the law until Admiral Pike caught him by the ear one day and pulled him into the academy as an alternative to doing real time. The Terran fleet was blemished with all kinds of criminals who had enough assets to be appropriated into the lowest assistance jobs, but Kirk had blown the roof off of that trend in his quick climb to power, making him both a glamorized underdog to the civilians and not nearly as popular among his peers as Jim himself had come to be.

"Did you look up anything else?" Uhura asks. She's looking through their food storage in the basement while he's hunched over studying a PADD in the pale yellow light.

"No."

She sucked it up and searched a couple days ago, and finally tells him now. "My mother is still in Pemba. I'm taking the trip to meet her tomorrow."

His brow is furrowed distractedly over what he's reading while she finishes cleaning up.

She's back at the bottom of the staircase when he suddenly asks over his shoulder, "Do you need somebody to go with you?"

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They are mostly silent during the shuttle rides and the hour's walk through the island to a house he can tell is familiar to her in some ways but not in others, a small but well-built place close to the edge of the quieter parts of town.

At the end of the walkway, Uhura stops. Jim gives her a patient but expectant look, responding to her obvious trepidation with "Yeah, I know. Take your time."

"It's stupid, but just..." She isn't looking at him when she asks, "Would you hold my hand?"

Without replying he just takes it, and she grasps it back a bit tightly. In the middle of all the daylight there's Jim imagining that he's a kid creeping into a haunted house squeezing hands with some other kid, and then this woman comes out of the front door.

She is harmless and kind-looking, her expression gaping in disbelief, and he feels Uhura tense, almost trembling next to him. The mother has her hand over her heart and the air seems to crackle with a life stirring painfully into her. At long last she says, "Nyota?..."

"Mama," she sobs back and then the arms are coming around her. There is a long blur of tears and sentiments that disappear into tight lines of Swahili while Jim cracks a look of momentary relief, standing with his hands in his pockets.

Before he knows it they're in a kitchen drinking tea, and after a lot of explanations the woman is far too happy to realize don't perfectly connect, she looks over at Jim with a smile as if he's an old friend.

"You're Captain Kirk...Aren't you?"

He gives her a gracious half-smile. "I'm no captain anymore, ma'am."

Looking back at her daughter she shakes her head incredulously, face a bit pained. "I never thought I'd see you again...Even before I heard about the accident, I never thought in a hundred years you'd ever leave..."

"I wanted to run, for a long time. We just didn't get the chance till now, and it's not even safe for us to be here, but I wanted to see you, and I'm just. I'm sorry, Mama..." Tears are still welling in Nyota's eyes, misplaced but genuine, seemingly actually morose. Jim feels a strange itch of wanting to clutch her hand again.

Later she shows him her room.

"I thought you wanted to tell her the truth," he mutters, but it's without judgment.

"I did." She shakes her head, overwhelmed. "But all she sees is that her baby girl has come home, and...I don't think that woman who lived here was ever going to come back."

She looks at a beautiful illustration of a map on the wall, brushes a hand over it, a distant bitterness coming into her features.

"Apparently she was eighteen, and some charismatic recruiting officer came into town and met her, and she was just gone the next day and she never came back home again. She didn't comm, she didn't even write. Who does that?"

"I know, it's screwed up. But it wasn't you."

"God," she exclaims quietly, haunted by the childish items speckled about the bedroom. "It's so strange. Most of it's different, but there are little things...I did have this exact doll." She picks up the toy as she notices it, dangling the limbs along her fingers.

He looks at the smile etched on the fabric face, and without warning a fresh and hard pang of something catches into him. When she happens to look up at him she catches it in his eyes. He tries to shrug it off.

"I don't know, it's just...I would've liked to see all this for real. You know, yours. Not this."

Uhura's expression falls a bit. She's about to say something, but the mother's voice in the hall announces that dinner is done, so they move to leave. While they're in the hallway she hooks her pinky against his, briefly, like some silent consolation or thanks or something else he can't comprehend. Before they get to the kitchen she rubs at her own arms in a brief shudder and she remarks only loudly enough for him to hear, "She never kept the house this cold either."

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In the middle of the night, Kanoni Uhura's servant comes home. Jim is awake when Nyota sits up in bed and goes motionless in her inscrutable profile, listening to the talking downstairs that isn't quite harsh or an argument but something very cold.

Some blackening out length of time later, she must roll the blanket off of him; he wakes up shivering a little. She is breathing all wrong next to him with the bad rhythms of bad thoughts. He feels kind of helpless, and lonely, just lying next to her while he can practically smell the particular depression that happens in the middle of the night emanating from her, not even certain that it's a nightmare.

He leans in uncertainly, close behind her body without touching her, his hands grappling at the sheets for what to do. He finally whispers, "Hey. Wake up."

He hears a deeper breath go in and out, and her voice comes back just above a whisper, lucid. "I'm awake."

He stills where he's lying behind her, hitched with an uncertainty at the seeming shift of proximity, the fact that he has moved in and said something soft and it's different somehow, knowing that they're both awake. The shape of her shoulders seems to draw up the same bracing, halted contemplation, as for whatever reason he does not move. He just waits.

Down the hall the bathroom light flicks on. They don't move. A minute later the light's back off; a bedroom door shuts with a quiet tap. Her body turns into his like a window blind.

He almost doesn't move in response, the motions mostly steadying himself against her when he feels her under his hands, feels her hand moving down his spine and exploring a pale hip, some other coiling desperate motions too abstract around him in the nearly black dark of the room, and he can't see to understand what he's doing and what she's doing and where he's being moved or doing the moving as all he can think consciously about is trying to slow down the sudden hammering in his chest. And then she reaches down and between them and touches him, and something falls out of him all at once.

It's like his entire body is breaking down into one long sob as they move and sigh and loosen and tighten into the thing that falls, and he moves for her mouth as if to muffle their sounds in the little girl's room. Drunk on the darkness, he pulls her to him with the unthinking love of an animal to its universe, like she is a plane of lovelier dust, she is the only place he is in; warm and bearable and bright in his lungs, her name, her name again.

They're both trembling the entire time, and afterward, quiet. He's trying to figure out whether she's freaking out, when in a papery, two AM sort of voice, she tells him something he won't be able to remember in the morning. Maybe something about it being okay, and it only resounds like a goodbye to something else. Like the answer to that question everyone has lodged into them somewhere, the one they never ever want to be asked.

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He wakes up wrapped all over in a cotton quilt, face down on the pillow, and he thinks he's alone until she appears in front of him arranging some clothes on the floor. Already getting down to business when she realizes he's awake, explaining that some of the husband's old clothes were still in a wardrobe, and she thinks they'd fit McCoy better than what he'd scrounged up before.

He's rubbing the back of his wrist across his forehead, conscious of his near-nakedness but not really thinking he should do anything about it. "Oh."

"Oh, and there's some tea for you right there, if you need it to wake up." She stands up to go do something else. When he's up and dressed he realizes they're alone in the house; Kanoni is at work and probably gave the servant somewhere to go, perhaps being extra cautious that nobody figures out her daughter is here.

It doesn't take long for Jim to realize from the pace of Uhura's tidying and collecting that she intends for them to leave before anyone comes back. In regular runaway style, she leaves a note on the fridge. _You know I'm no good at goodbyes. Tell no one. Love always, N._

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Everything feels very quiet again as they're walking back. They're waiting for their shuttle on a bench at the terminal when Nyota says, in that tone that is always a sweet shock in its sadness, that voice that can break Vulcan hearts, "I'm sorry."

He doesn't need her to clarify what she's talking about. "I'm sorry too," he finally mutters.

As their ride is showing up just then, they're standing, but something makes her linger instead of move. She's looking at him with a soft and sudden worry. Maybe she doesn't want him to think she regrets him coming with her. What she does is go up to him and put a hand on his cheek, tip up to him to land the unexpected kiss on his mouth, short and with her eyes closed, and it feels different out here in the open.

All the way back, because it's the most painless thing to think about, he's already wondering if this is how it's going to be. One elusive kiss after another, each one an apology for the last.

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Scotty and McCoy, in the absence of the other two, became restless and had already commed Jim the first day they were gone to let him know they were going to check out this "situation" he was curious about.

When Jim and Nyota appear in the kitchen ready to pass out from all the travel, Bones announces that he thinks they can get a house in North Carolina.

"...Okay," Jim accepts with a cocked brow. "And by that, you mean..."

"Without..." Bones decides to paraphrase, "trouble."

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30 DAYS.

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No one calls it anything but Asheville, North Carolina, but everyone knows what's there. Were they to have said anything about their specific destination on the way, they may have only gotten scowls from most, maybe some refusals to do business, but nobody goes for the nearest comm to report somebody for being an abolitionist choosing to live with abolitionists. The prevailing attitude is "Better to have them where we can see them."

Or the somewhat politer "It's their funeral."

Jim will always remember how entering through the city is an uncertain surreal experience, how he sticks his head out the passenger side looking for anything unusual to pop up. The first bold indicator that they have come into very different territory is when they're at a stop and he realizes that a young pair standing by the street, one laughing and the other with a look of chagrin, are definitely not Terran.

"They're free?" Scotty is the first to chime out, but he already knows. One look at them, at people doing nothing in particular, and you just know. It isn't until they're accelerating that Jim notices one of them is carrying some kind of gun.

Those two are the only aliens they see for the several miles across the outskirts which, contrary to the structure of the usual city, seem to become less populated as they drive inwards, closer to a hugged-in somewhat greener rolling pocket of land that hosts a large village. When they approach it, they are met with a long tall barricade reminiscent of old-fashioned army camps. The group is about ready to turn back around when they decide, somewhat reluctantly, to approach a fenced entrance located between a couple high look-out towers.

The car isn't parked in front of the gate for very long before a figure that was leaning in next to it when they came up is getting on a battered-looking but apparently functional ranger-style comm unit, and then walking right up to them. She's thin and tall, and the third alien they've seen. Swiping a pair of eyes under regally arched brows up and down the four sitting in the car before she knocks on the window, she doesn't wait long to start with, "Did anyone call ahead?"

They awkwardly realize she's talking to a human man that just came up by the hood.

"Nope."

"Are you settling here?" she asks them.

It's an odd kind of dichotomous shift then, because "I guess so" sure as hell wouldn't do. McCoy is obviously kind of flustered, and Jim's the one who impatiently hollers, "Yeah." She says something to the man, who shrugs and looks at them with the mildly pleased surprise of someone now given something to do.

They all get out of the car to answer a number of questions. Jim keeps expecting something to give away the strangeness of their situation, but they don't even end up having to give them their (false) last names, at least not yet.

"Do you know anyone living on the inside?"

"No," Jim answers.

"So you have no employment or living space pre-arranged."

"No...Is that gonna be a big problem?"

"We have," she announces pertly after looking at a grid for an almost amusingly short period of time, "a two-bedroom." It's not the beginning of a list. "Housing is a free-for-all, but you will have to do some cleaning up."

Jim shrugs as they all look like they're not sure what to say. "Great."

"Jim, right?" She pulls out some list, reads off flatly, "When was the last time you owned a slave."

He can feel the others tensing, but not in an increment the others would notice.

"About fifteen months ago. Um. I inherited him from my parents when I moved out of their home, and we all owned him where we were living together. He died in an accident."

"Species?"

"...Klingon," he replies.

At some point he feels like the interrogation could have easily been five minutes or could have been five hours, depending on the impression they all gave, and he has no doubt they might have split them up to see if their histories matched up when questioned separately if not for their extremely harmless appearance. He's nervous as hell when she starts asking them about what they're carrying in, then, but when they're honest about the phaser weapons she doesn't come off like it's anything unusual.

She just automatically says, "We only allow one weapon of that classification to a household."

Jim lets out a sigh. "So you're confiscating one."

The man who's been talking less than the Romulan interjects, "It's not like we're just gonna hang it on our wall. We'll put it to good use, probably with the league."

"The league?"

"You'll see," is all the woman replies, and Jim's suddenly aware that it might be kind of a nuisance to grill the people at the front door on every single thing they don't understand, so he makes an effort not to pry into things. He gets into the bags in the back and locates one of the phasers, and the man greets the barely-used model with an appreciative whoop-whistle.

Once the four of them seem to be in the clear of getting their feet through the door, the woman sets herself into a slightly more stern manner and starts listing off. "Okay, first thing's first. Once you're past the wall, you can leave and come back once. Once only. If you wanna leave again? You don't come back.

"There's a communal food supply, first-come-first-serve on quota, and it comes in every couple weeks at the south dock, sometimes only once a month. It's usually not enough to live by, but you can buy food inside. There are jobs, sometimes, depending on what you can do."

Bones shrugs and volunteers, "I'm a doctor."

It's a little jarring how that gets an immediate reaction out of her, and from the man who's been inspecting the phaser and idling around their car, though when they meet eyes they seem to be suppressing something, trying not to get any hopes up.

"What kind of doctor?"

"Well, I'm definitely not a vet," Bones says, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets. "I've got experience treating about half a dozen species."

Of course that's a modesty of how much xenophysiology he's got under his belt, but the Romulan still looks hesitantly amazed.

"You don't already have a doctor?"

"We've got one," the man mutters. "And let's just say we could use some competition in the field. Don't you guys have a physician at the Knot?" The man is turning that question on his partner. She rolls her eyes.

"He's more like a science teacher."

Jim exchanges a look with Nyota, but neither of them asks anything.

"Two more things," the Romulan says. "You need to get your credits changed to our currency. Go to Jason's for that, he's in the little shack with the beer light, you'll see it on the way in. And also, we're giving you a ride. Your car needs to stay up here until we can get somebody to inspect it more closely, which could be a couple days."

That sets a spark into Scotty for the first time in days. "Inspection?" he demands.

"A couple _days_?" Bones exclaims. Jim doesn't feel good about it either; in fact, he's more uneasy about leaving the car up here than he was about the phaser, but there's clearly nothing for it, and he admits some understanding of the situation when the woman explains that there was an incident with an explosive in an abandoned car about a month ago.

With their few possessions it doesn't take them long to unload the stationwagon. Their ride is in the back of a noisy truck, and as the man (Will, Jim gathered when the Romulan woman called him that at some point, because neither of them ever actually introduced themselves) drives them into the center, the four are too busy taking in the different surroundings to say much of anything to each other. Passing across the border of the barricade feels like folding into a different planet entirely, with long undecorated expanses of land, with all the man-made surfaces riddled with rust and patched-in places and even graffiti. Jim does a double take once they're driving along a gap road through the grass, at the first stretch of wooden fence they see separating the area from the outer land. Snaking lines of paint that dripped a little before drying form a long expanse of words as tall as men across the old wood, and they ring in their red color like a mantra, a reminder:

_HELL IS ON THE OTHER SIDE_.

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They kept saying to themselves they had no reason to think it would be happier "out there," only that it would be better, and they were right. If Jim is completely honest with himself, he was hoping for a bit more of a sense of universal good nature, some enthusiasm and brotherhood over the naked cause of being there, but he didn't let himself expect it. It is not completely joyless and cold, but happiness is a delicate commodity. It tins briefly through a song playing on an old man's half-busted old radio unit, one of many eerily old-fashioned goods to be found in this scrapped-up junkyard version of their continent.

Their house is old and white, located in a sparsely conjoined row of a neighborhood that ropes off from the surprisingly bustling town that teems with bars and other businesses, the type of pseudo-recreational offerings that get set up just to give people somewhere to work. It's early morning when they arrive there, and without the car to help them get much of anything else done, they promptly get to work throwing out the heaps of garbage left behind in the home.

The kitchen is the biggest room in the house that has any sunlight in it, and McCoy hesitantly declares that it's probably where the clinic should be. "...Which means we might not actually use it as a kitchen."

Jim just shrugs and Scotty adds, "Whatever."

There are some furnishings left behind, including a salvageable couch that would be a hefty pain in the ass to move out of the narrow halls anyway. They're still tidying up the little living room space when Bones pauses next to Nyota, sets his hands on his hips and says, "I'm unloading the bags. Where do you want your stuff?"

She takes a second to realize what he's asking, and blinks at him. "I...I thought you and Jim would want to room together—"

"Nyota." Bones repeats, "Where do you want your stuff?"

No one would disagree that it's fair to let her pick; the other three have an unspoken sympathy for the fact that she's the most alone out of all of them, even if it's not by a big margin. Bones is practically a brother to Jim, and Scotty's been friends with both of them pretty much since the return journey after Nero. Jim can practically sense the sequence of Nyota's thoughts as she uncomfortably shrugs at all of them over it. She definitely considers McCoy a friend if not a particularly intimate one, and she and Scotty knew each other well enough to have a couple running jokes between them back during the mission. There are two beds in the house, and all of this considered none of them could really have a problem with any possible arrangement, but still. It should be up to her; they're all willing to give her that.

And after milling it over for a few minutes as if she'd rather just toss a coin, the first and final thing she mutters is, "I've known Jim the longest..."

Bones looks like that isn't what he expected, but also like it makes enough sense. He gives her a touch on the shoulder and moves out of the room.

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After the first week, during which it looks like the only useful thing anyone can do yet is help McCoy organize all of the medical supplies they've been carting around ever since they left space, Jim is the first to find a job. He casually announces it the same day he and Bones head back from Jason's with all their money put in for the town's own paper currency, which is worth the annoying heft of three sacks' worth of paper bulk for Scotty's odd fascination with the novelty of actual material cash.

"Where?" Nyota asks, squinting over the soup she's eating at the little kitchen table they've moved into the living room, one thin knee poised up to hold a reading PADD on her lap.

"Trashy little dive called Rosetta's."

"Oh," McCoy acknowledges, "I've seen it."

A look passes over the rest of them like it figures Jim would somehow find work first when the rest of them seem to be ready to give up. He keeps reassuring them they haven't seen the whole town.

And indeed they haven't. Scotty brushes in from walking around one day, calling their attention away from squinting at the smudged labels on a cart of hyposprays when he asks, "Did you know there's a ship for sale uptown?"

It doesn't seem possible. Jim hasn't even considered that the blacklist-opposing town of no-background-checks, almost-no-questions-asked might be a place where they could actually buy a ship. The possibility is all too vague to yield any enthusiasm; it's a topic that passes dully over them, and they only briefly talk about it. None of them bring the subject to the actual question of money, but the thought is there with the heaviness of it being "a ship," not "some ships."

Most people around town are Terrans, sprinkled with the occasional non-Romulan aliens; if the other liberationist humans act differently from the people they encountered on the outside, it's with a refreshing and vaguely youthful type of near-rudeness. Jim already hates his boss (he doesn't mention it to the others), but everyone else seems agreeable enough, if not exactly yielding to his instinct for companionship.

Every once in a while, you see some of the Romulans. Most of the time they're in a tangle running around noisily like partying students, spouting with camaraderie and short-lived fights in equal measure; but the ones you see more than anyone else are the "league," who are almost too much for Bones the first time they see them running around carrying a formidable plethora of firearms (both phaser and a weird mix of probably locally crafted bullet-loaded ones) in their holsters.

"Some of them are just kids," he exclaims.

"You have to remember Vulcanoids look a little young to us," Uhura reminds him, granting, "but yeah, some of them are probably still on the young side of adolescence."

It wouldn't be as jarring if not for the fact that their introduction to the League was the night something like five of them came roaring in playing bad-cop-worse-cop with the assistant manager of the run-down corner store where Nyota wanted to buy some aspirin. They never got a chance to figure out what the manager had done that was so suspicious, but there was a horrifying moment when Jim almost thought they were about to watch her get her head blown open right in front of them, before she choked out some confession, apparently guilty, and they tied her hands together and shoved her off the premises, lifting a few goods from the shop on their way out the door. And the entire time, none of them even looked at the four humans backed into the corner.

Most of the time, they're just regular people, and a fascinating mix of dots on the cultural spectrum at that. A few of them speak fluent Romulan, some of them couldn't even try; they wear their traditional tunics with Terran jeans, order orange soda with their _viinerine_at the diners, run around playing tag in the streets and insult each other with "Go suck a knuckle, fucker."

Aside from civility, they for the most part don't seem to want anything to do with humans. The divide is strongly sealed by the fact that they all live at a separately fenced-in camp that runs the length of about three quarters of a mile in front of the view of the mountains, the long and constantly guarded front gates beginning somewhere past the lake. On his walk home from work Jim sometimes squints across the distance at the armed figures standing by the entrances and gets a feeling that their eyes are tracking him the entire time. He recognizes the worst of the typically Romulan attitude in their cold separation, but he can also appreciate the equally apparent quiet cunning evident in the very existence of the place, the fact that they take what they're taught in the sweat of the factories and use it to gradually build up their freedom away from a population that doesn't know how to fix its own computers.

They spend more energy muttering a sarcastic "Long live the empress" in reply to a news broadcast than they do on anything more pro-active; all of it is the exact type of shitty, cynical, resigned attitude that gets nothing done. After spending only a short time in the world outside of this beat-up place, where everyone hardly acknowledged the gray areas long enough to shrug them off, Jim absolutely loves it.

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It doesn't take long until Jim can't wait any longer, so on his first day off, after coming home from helping to hand out some flyers for the clinic, Jim gets that announcing look in his features and says to everyone, "Let's go get a look at this thing."

The ship is parked in the middle of the local mechanic's scrap yard, where it looks pretty big, but is only the size of an average private trading vessel. It's old, and it looks like the piece of shit you learn to treat with affectionate mockery at every unpredictable malfunction, and Scotty is so immediately taken with the very idea of it that he immediately asks, "How much are you charging for that heap?"

The mechanic's name is Brighton, but he laughs at them far before he gets around to introducing himself.

"Everyone who works for me wants that ship," he explains. "I'm eventually going to auction it, some time next year."

Nyota cocks an eyebrow at the rest of them.

"Well." Jim laughs. "Are you hiring?"

"What can you do?"

"I can do pretty much anything, Scotty here can do it twice as fast," Jim confidently says with a gesture introducing the engineer standing at his side. He looks over at Nyota, but her expression is shy.

She interrupts, "I don't know if I'd be any help...I have a basic grasp of computer systems in large class vessels, but..."

"Well, that's impressive." Brighton shoves his hands in his pockets. "But not really useful."

She lets out a forced scoff, anxiously pacing on her feet.

"I could put anyone to work on repairs, but I don't have time to train, so I really couldn't use any kind of programmer." Brighton jingles something in his pocket and is already heading into the office building; yelling over his shoulder, purely facetious, he adds, "Unless you happened to know Vulcan. I've been trying to translate the goddamn interfacing on this antique cruiser for a couple years now..."

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They're both sitting up in bed when she turns her head over to him. "Jim?"

"Hmm."

"...Do you want that ship?"

He gives a resistant sigh.

"You took a second job, so I thought..." He's still quietly cynical. "It could be a long time before he sells it—"

"I've already done the numbers. It's hard to tell yet how much Bones is gonna be making on a regular basis, but...Brighton was willing to be pretty upfront with me about how much his other workers will probably be able to put down." He looks at her frankly in response to her questioning eyes. "Look. We're going to be _hungry_if we want even a chance."

Her look is surprisingly unwavering. "How hungry?"

"This is ridiculous." He knows what she's trying to do, and feels the need to clarify, "I'm not the captain anymore."

"Since when does that mean you don't get a vote in anything? Do you want it or not?...Jim."

"Yes, I want it. I want it bad. Can you even imagine how different things would be if we had a ship? Out there it's just a free-for-all, nothing about us would be nearly as suspicious, but..." He spreads his arms out to represent how hopeless it still is.

She says, "Well. I'm pretty sure we all want it too." And then she lies down to go to sleep.

He follows soon after; like most nights, they lie down back to back, taking a very long time to get to sleep, pretending not to know the other is awake.

The bedroom arrangement has so far proved to be sort of unintentionally favorable in terms of their styles of grieving. There's something reassuring about the divide between dealing in silence and the occasional rituals of talking it out between Bones and Scotty. Sometimes Jim is present for the dialogue, about what everybody misses, about home, and he can handle being around it, but he only lurks at the edges of it. Like on one evening when they're all squeezed on the porch with the two of them, and Scotty is asking, "What would you do if you were back on the ship, right this second? Like if it was just any normal day, what would you do differently?"

Jim can hear Bones on his right, the loud sighs of his more pensive state. With a sudden certainty he finally says, "I would kiss Christine Chapel, full on the mouth."

And well, that does get a reaction out of Jim.

But Bones gives him kind of a wave, clarifies, "It's not like it was anything more than what it was. It's just that it never had a chance. I don't think I ever even thought about it before we were here. I don't know. You try to make a list of all the things you never got to know about somebody, never did with somebody, that you feel just fine having never bothered with..."

"It's a bloody short list, if you try," Scotty distantly intones.

Next to him in the jammed space on the porch step, Nyota's eyes are cold on the horizon when he sneaks a look, her body huddled in on herself; he senses it as the same tight feeling he tries to push out of his chest. He sifts his left foot a little closer to her, but that's all he does. He gives it a few minutes before he distracts her by asking, "Anything about the market?"

She lets loose a puff of irritation. "Yeah...Rumor has it the next shipment is peanut butter cups."

"Are you kidding me?" Bones demands.

She just shakes her head, and Jim feels soft affection at her misdirected anger. "You don't like peanut butter cups?" he prods.

"I don't like chocolate."

"Seriously?"

The next day the donation shipment is a scant amount of pork, half a dozen packages of boxed pasta per household, and an absurd amount of peanut butter cups. None of them have managed to get in a word with anybody who knows for sure where the food comes from, and it's likely that they get sent anonymously so that sympathizers don't get too deep into trouble. Wherever it's coming from, they try to take it gratefully, Bones scowling at some of the lack of nutritional value but never openly bitching about it.

He gets a multitude of regular patients bustling in and out of the kitchen over the weeks, and the rest take to their jobs with the morale of routine that numbs through the daytime. Figures stir and snap awake in the night throughout the narrow white house, then fall asleep after half-awake comforting mumbles or the simple reassuring awareness of another body next to them. Jim scrubs floors, waits tables, takes apart engine after engine, burns and scuffs his hands and comes home to toss tips into the long box they keep under the couch. They stay put; they stay alive.

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One evening Jim walks in from accompanying Bones out to a late house call, and when Bones is headed straight to the shower, Jim abruptly discovers a Romulan in the kitchen. Not a patient needing a doctor, just a woman who is helping herself to the fridge and yelling over her shoulder into the living room, and Jim realizes that Scotty is not rambling off some story to Uhura but to her, and can't help stopping in his tracks and probably giving her a rather stupid look as she shuts the door and notices him with a small jolt.

He clears his throat.

She says, "Hey." And leaves the kitchen.

Nyota appears just behind him with a somewhat sheepish look on her face. She makes a motion for him to come out on the porch.

"Right, so." Bones is explaining a few minutes later, "I'm pretty sure you met her the first time she came over here with a bad flu, cause I remember it was also that day you and Nyota went to get the car..."

"Oh, wait." He's nodding, recalls vaguely that time when Bones was still struggling to compartmentalize his working space into some measure of privacy; Jim had been coming in just to get some water and found a bit of a crowd of two patients, one of whom Scotty had gotten caught up talking to even as Bones kept trying to wrangle him out of the room, but something about the handful of lines of the conversation he'd picked up on sticks out to him now. "She's the one with the fancy little revolver he was asking about?"

"'Did you make it?', 'How could you tell?', 'Oh, just the way you were talkin' about it.' Yadda, yadda..." Bones mockingly quotes this with a roll of his eyes, which means he probably actually found it kind of cute. "I think it had to be about two months before we ever saw her again, I think they ran into each other around town some time after and he invited her over. Anyway, she keeps saying she won't come back. Doesn't trust humans and all that, but then. She keeps coming back."

"And," Jim slowly says, "I'm the only person who hasn't heard about her...just because I haven't happened to be around."

This is when Nyota finally says something, hesitantly. "We just thought...you'd be really concerned or—"

"For Christ sake, you guys are talking like you expect me to tell Scotty he's not allowed to make friends. It really wasn't even something I'd thought might happen, and anyway, it's not _up_to me. But just to be clear. Yeah, I'm pretty concerned."

Bones lets out a slight understanding laugh.

"They don't seem to follow much of that stuff around here, but our names are in the news..."

"Which Scotty did realize," Nyota interjects. "...In the middle of introducing me. Which is why she thinks my name's Nina."

"_Nina_?" Jim makes a rueful smile that's identical to McCoy's as he looks and points at the doctor in question, learning a moment later that he is no longer the only one who calls him Bones.

"To my delight," Bones mumbles.

"Well." Jim gets up then to go inside, and heads back to the living area where he pops his head around the door and gives a friendly appraising look at the Romulan woman, looking closer this time. She's a bit on the short side, has a body that looks well-worked, and at the moment a toothy but endearing slight grin at whatever Scotty is rambling on about. When she turns her head towards him, he says, "Hi. I'm Jim."

She laughs at the forwardness, shrugs and says, "I'm Jill."

"Nice to meet you."

She does keep coming. And half of the time it's actually for medical reasons, or at least Bones makes it's about medical reasons as soon as he swipes a tricorder up at her, Jim soon learns in a conversation that starts with him remarking, "I don't really like how she always has to cart the gun in here. Why do they always carry them, anyway, they're stronger than anybody who would wanna mess with them in the streets."

"She isn't."

"What?"

"I guess you wouldn't have read about this, you haven't been reading anything...Some of the Romulan slaves come from these 'clinics'," he spat the word out with ripe disgust, "where they're trying to genetically engineer some of the enslaved races to be more defenseless."

Jim needs a second to process that. No, he needs about five days to process that. And he almost had a good appetite coming home.

"The slang term they use for themselves is 'spays.'" Bones has a dark look in his eyes as he goes on. "These altered types, though, they've got all kinds of problems, these imbalances in their physiology. Her immune system's basically shot. I wouldn't be surprised if she has severe muscle pain all the time, and is just so used to it, you'd never know. And she's got friends like her who hate doctors even more, so I can't imagine..."

"So is she like a test subject or something?" Jim asks quietly. "I mean, wouldn't they try to make that better, before they sell them, cause wouldn't they..." But his voice trails off.

"The clinics are also where you send your slaves if they get sick. They literally come with warranties—Hers comes up anytime the tricorder picks up her neck brand."

"—Fuck me."

"Just like they used to make light bulbs they knew would burn out. You have to keep buying more."

Jim just lets out another low sharp curse, sitting far back in his chair.

He doesn't exactly get along with Jill, even if it's just because she makes him nervous. They constantly have to check themselves to make sure they don't call attention to anything extraordinary that might make her ask too many questions. Jill insists that Nyota's Romulan accent is lousy, even though it isn't, it's just that apparently the most standard dialect back home is mostly extinct here.

She comes over pretty early in the morning sometimes, one time joining a group of them at the kitchen table while Scotty goes to get something out of the car.

Bones is checking the time and asking, "You're not late?"

"I'm working 'setta's today," Jim says without putting down what he's reading.

A smirk of disbelief comes over Jill. "You work at Rosetta's?"

"Yeah. It's not as skeezy as everyone says," he says, interrupting her next comment. "We're supposed to flirt, but that's as far as it goes."

"Yeah, flirt with the customers, and the manager..." Her eyebrow arches high as she shakes her head. "She's _ryakna_. Most of the league have been looking for an excuse to get her out of here. There's just no way she's around for any good reason. She'll probably take her profit and leave as soon as she runs out of her food stash, and take a good handful of jobs with her."

"She is kind of...soulless." Ignoring the way Nyota and Bones are looking at each other right across him, he shrugs and mutters, "I don't think she ever really hits on her employees, though, it's all just a power trip."

When he looks to the side, there's a look in McCoy's face like Jim's about to get some kind of lecture. He's already resigned himself when Bones asks, "You gonna finish eating that?"

"No. If you don't want it, put it in the fridge."

"I'm saying eat it, smartass."

"Oh, this again," Scotty is sighing as he swiftly takes the seat next to Jill. "Eat up, Jimmy thing."

"As if you haven't been losing weight," Jim mutters.

"You're starting to look like Nina," Jill jokes, and Nyota sends her into some lazy laughter by giving her a halfway-offended look. She amends, "And it doesn't look as good on you."

Bones says, "Why don't you tell him there are starving children at home?"

Another short laugh. "Where are you getting your information? We have more food than anybody."

"Really? You guys don't have a replicator, do you?" Scotty intercedes.

Bones interrupts, "For Christ sake, Jim, eat your fucking breakfast for once."

"I'm _full_," Jim protests, his voice nearing a real angry volume now.

Nyota's in on it now like she's making up for lost time. "I've seen you put away three of those in one sitting."

He slides the plate pointedly over so that it's offered in front of her; she practically throws it back at him without even looking over.

Jill makes some annoyed exclamation in Romulan. "Would you just eat the damn thing? And yeah, we're very well fed at the Knot. At least compared to you guys."

"Where do you get it all?" Bones is undoubtedly thinking about how they hardly ever see Romulans buying food at the markets.

"Wait, well." Scotty makes a waving motion out the window, realizing it's obvious. "Your back door is the woods."

"I'd thought about hunting before, but we don't really have the right stuff," Jim points out with a shrug.

"Sometimes we hunt, sometimes we set traps..." Jill's mouth cracks up at the edges. "Of course, humans are always pretty good, if we've had to arrest somebody lately."

Everyone has to admit that they look at her all appalled for at least a second, until she gives into a little snort, and Scotty's the first to sheepishly exclaim, "Oh, for—That wasn't even that good."

Everyone is actually laughing; it's the first time in forever Jim can remember _really_laughing, with a brightly natural ease rather than it feeling somehow frantic and precarious.

As if it feels like a natural conclusion, Jim is reaching for his plate and picking up the very boring excuse for a sandwich involving the bread that Bones ran to the store for last week in one of his monthly carb-deprived rages. "Alright, I'm gonna eat this, because Jill asked so nicely. Fuck the rest of you."

And Jill gives a silly little cheer as he takes a bite.

Later that night there's a seemingly never-ending stream of obscenities heard from the kitchen where Scotty and Jill are crowded on a stretcher in front of the viewscreen. Jim and Nyota get caught up leaning into the doorway watching for a moment until Jim mutters, "Romulan temperaments and video games?..."

He has no idea where Scotty dug up the ancient thing and had it rigged up to the computer before Bones could realize what he was doing, but the wireless function of the handsets is obviously wonky at best, prompting most of the cursing when one of them misses.

"Apparently not the best combination," Nyota agrees with a wry smile.

"You're dead," Jill chants through the cheap clacky noise of the plastic guns. "You're dead, you're dead, you're fucking _dead_."

A second later Scotty makes an angry grunt, and Bones is heard from the living room yelling, "Don't kick anything in there!" Jill grins and spins the fake gun around her finger in quiet triumph.

Scotty complains, "Ah, fuck off. Show-off...No, wait, I didn't actually mean—"

"No, I actually have to go now." Jill's already up and putting her jacket back on.

"...Oh. Well, when can you—"

"When I feel like it," she says, impatient and noncommittal but giving a softer and more promising smile to him on her way out of the kitchen. "Bye," she says to Jim and Nyota sitting on the counter. They reply with half-distracted nods, Jim's eyes almost automatically straying to the genuine article hanging from her belt, too unthinking an instinct when she's around for him to place if it's really worry.


	3. The Neighborhood

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chapter 3

**the neighborhood**

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He wakes up in the middle of the night with a crashing pain that rings all over from the back of his head, barely registering what happened as his voice coughs out into a short and loud groan.

"Jim?" In the dark, Nyota's head appears looking over him from the top of the lofted bed. Her voice is scratched with sleep but a little urgent, and it feels like she doesn't even give him a second to reply before her feet are hopping down and passing by him and running down the hallway, towards the other bedroom.

"I'm fine," he insists five or six times when he's still on his back on the hard wood, any movement he makes provoking a bruising flash of pain in his head. Nyota seems to avoid looking right at him as she bites her bottom lip and Bones still goes at his head with the tricorder even though his worry has calmed quite a bit.

"You're not fine," Bones announces tersely, "you have a minor concussion." Jim wonders where the hypospray comes from, imagining in his annoyance that the man keeps them in his damn pajamas. Before he can make any remark about it, Bones is abruptly grumbling, "What the hell kinda nightmare makes you knock a guy to the floor?"

Nyota almost imperceptibly cringes; Jim dismissively says, "It's a small bed. And I seriously don't feel like I've got a concussion."

"You've got a hell of a headache obviously...Are you dizzy? Any ringing in your ears?"

"No." Jim sighs. "And no."

"Nausea..."

"Okay, yeah. I kinda feel I'm gonna throw up." He feels the need to amend, "But not like I'm actually going to."

"You're good and concussed, kid," Bones concludes, and Jim can only distantly frown at that very expired endearment which the doctor sometimes recycles just for old time's sake. "Let's get you back in bed. Up and at 'em."

After he makes a sort of amusingly weak attempt at getting up before giving squinting resignation, Nyota and Bones sigh and more or less manage to lift him back up and roll him onto the bed. He can feel the lingering worry in McCoy's movements, the slightly more familial way he touches him on the shoulder than he tended to do long before now.

"Thanks," he mutters, already feeling his eyes heavily shutting.

"I want you to wake him up again before morning, make sure he can still name a couple presidents and all that," he says to Nyota, who nods as she settles back down on the other side of the small bed. "Come wake me up again if anything's wrong."

Jim plunges back asleep and is awakened later by something soft and nice, her mouth lightly pursed somewhere at his jaw and her body leaning in over him slightly.

He feels a smirk crawling up his face before he fully opens his eyes. "Hmm. I should hit my head on things more often if this is the treatment I get."

"Shut up," she gets out in a bit of a laugh.

There's a blue hint of sunlight in the room. He can see enough of her face that he wants to touch it, and does, with a lazy tracing of his finger down her cheek. Her expression slowly and softly dulls to that shy guilt from earlier.

"...I can't believe I did that. I'm sorry."

"Hey, no. Whose ingenious idea was it to loft the bed over the shelf anyway?"

"Yours." She cracks a tiny smile. They're silent for a while, and the moment passes. "So do you remember where you are?"

"Yeah," he says up to the ceiling after a few seconds. "I know where I am."

And their bodies disconnect and turn, lying back to back again.

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Brighton apparently has a troubling habit of ignoring his comm, so Jim has to saunter into his office to apologize for taking a sick day. But Brighton doesn't seem to take attendance, cause when he looks over from chewing his lip in front of his viewscreen he just says, "Hey, Cyrus." Even though he always calls him that, Jim is still getting used to the fake last name. "By the way, loved your handiwork on that compact. I was able to mark it up quite a bit before I shipped it out."

"Oh, the energy conversion ended up being a bitch, but I figured you'd want a good overhaul. Thanks. And..." He just can't help how his voice trails off: The captain of the ISS_ Enterprise _is on the news.

"...Have you not heard about this?"

"Heard what?" Jim replies, squinting at what is probably some stock footage of Spock meeting at embassies and all that, while he can't quite make sense of what the announcer is saying about him.

"Apparently he negotiated a truce between these two, uh...these planets that kept going at each other. It's been really controversial cause up until now the T.E. was obviously just letting it happen so they'd basically wipe themselves out to the point of being more dependent on us? Tellarites and someone else, I think."

Jim takes a minute to respond. "And what does our glorious Empire make of this?"

"I think the general idea is they wish they'd thought of it. It's looking to be economically good for them after all. But it's a big mess cause the captain isn't talking like he's making an exception, he's talking like he thinks this kind of thing is generally a good idea, and they're not exactly tripping over in excitement to agree with _that_."

There is a trace of cynicism in Brighton's explanation. Jim's puzzlement probably reflects the attitude, and he barely realizes he's saying it aloud when he mutters, "What the hell are you up to?" to the image of the goateed Spock up on the screen.

"Yeah, who the hell knows," Brighton says with a shrug.

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It's freezing and snowing outside the night that Bones walks in, angry with shivering, declaring that there's "some serious powwow" happening at the Knot. Jim saw the first bursts of color from the fireworks and parade-like gatherings earlier, but when he can hear some bass rhythm pulsing outside just from their porch he assumes it must have really picked up.

He's downright puzzled when somebody has the audacity to come knocking this late during a weekend, opens the door with a mumbled "What the fuck?" and is even more confused to see Jill.

Sometimes he almost forgets that Jill is still, if a tweaked version of Romulan, still Romulan. She's wearing such a nearly comical amount of layers it's kind of hilarious making out her nonchalant face beyond the rings of fluff surrounding her head, and it makes him remember how much easier it is for them to get cold.

But apparently even when she's not as strong as an average Vulcanoid she can still carry a family-sized flatscreen across town like it's her purse.

"You...brought us entertainment." He squints at her other side. "And beer?"

She gives a little laugh, not even inviting herself in yet. "It's a viewscreen none of us seem to want. Well, I nabbed it off somebody who would claim to care, but won't notice it's gone for one or two weeks, so. Oh, and it's similar to beer. You'll like it."

Nyota is coming up to them still yelling something down the hall at Scotty. "It's _Jill_!" she's saying, with an exasperation as if she expects to have to repeat herself to Scotty's usual finnickiness over the doorbell.

"Come on in. And thanks, but," Jim pauses, awkwardly running a hand through his hair and slowly tries to explain, "We have kind of a household pact about not drinking alcohol?..."

Nyota's the one who squints at the six-pack, her expression a little bit imploring when she looks at Jim.

"...Except for special occasions," Jim finally amends, gladly taking the drinks from Jill and saying, "Get in here already."

Jill comes inside and stomps the snow off her boots, begins de-layering; the yellowy flush from being in the cold starts to fade from her face, and a thick burst of her brown hair escapes from her hood. It's the first time Jim's seen it outside of her distinctive fat braid that hangs down her back.

Later when they're sitting on the couch or just on pillows on the floor, Scotty asks Jill what the special occasion actually is.

"It's a big send-off."

"Oh, that's right." Scotty seems to be recalling a conversation the others weren't around for. "Somebody's got a vessel already fixed up in there."

"Somebody's leaving?" Nyota asks in surprise. "They...How?"

"I've actually experimentally checked out the mainframes," Scotty reassures, "and if you've got all the right bells and whistles, you can set off jamming signals to get off of here."

"You've checked it out?" Jill asks with some amusement. Then her face gets a bit more serious. "Are you all trying to leave?"

Before any of them can start to work out an answer, her certainty solidifies with another realization.

"Most of you work for Brighton."

Talking about money is acceptable etiquette around town, it seems, but no one really talks about Brighton's ship. Nobody outright asks you if you're going to bid. It's not a subject. And Jill doesn't ask, but she doesn't really have to.

"Oh," she says, her voice small before the shrugs and says a little more casually, "Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition, I guess."

And fuck if that doesn't give Jim a pretty nasty feeling; before he can ask, she shrugs and nods.

"I'm planning on leaving with a few of mine if they get it." Jim almost can't grasp how her tone isn't at all bitter or judgmental when she says, "But, I don't get it. If you want to go abolitionist in space, it's easy. You don't have to come here to buy a ship..."

"We wouldn't exactly pass the background checks," Bones says, noncommittal in how much more he's willing to tell.

Jill pauses in the motion of tipping up her bottle; with a little sneering smile she slowly asks, "Are you guys in trouble with the law or something?"

Jim quickly insists, "We're here because we want to be."

"Hey, it's none of my business." She shrugs, and the indifference is forced but sincere.

Scotty is the most equipped to naturally change the subject and starts to ask Jill if she's here because she doesn't know any of the people skipping off.

"Actually, one of them is a friend of mine...To be honest, I kind of came here hoping I could just get buzzed with you all and not have to think too hard about it."

"You can get drunk?" Jim is suddenly curious.

"Of course I can get drunk. I'm way behind you guys right now, but I just need something pretty strong. Though, it might help if you had something sugary lying around."

Nyota blinks and remembers, "I think we still have an emergency supply of those peanut butter cups from the end of summer."

"_Ugh_, I can't even look at those anymore," Bones groans. "Help yourself."

She does, and she's on her third package when Jim, already halfway gone on what is the strongest thing to ever call itself beer, words some question vaguely approaching the issue of whether the Knot has any "unified and/or long-term plan." She gets a sort of _Don't get me started _look on her face.

"Depends on who you ask. Some of them think that D'era is going to deliver us from suffering." A lofty, possibly mocking gesture. "Other people think this place is really going to hold up for as long as they need it."

"And you don't?" Scotty asks.

"What do _you_ think?" She gives a cringing little shrug, as if not planning on really elaborating, but when Scotty's not so wavering, she lays out, "Look. I'm into history. This isn't the first time somebody's tried to start a little revolution against the T.E., and it's like nobody around here even realizes that. This may be the most well-equipped one there's ever been, but all it means is the Empire is going to have to get _bored _before they bother to gather together enough of their people to come in here and clean us up. But they're going to do it."

"So you're worried about the Imperials?" Bones wants to clarify. "More than just any slave traders that wanna mess around here?"

"It would have to be a very organized, very large group of slave runners to even get in the front door. And we've been attacked before, about a year ago...Didn't end well for them. But it all depends. In case of an aerial attack...I'm not really supposed to tell you guys this, but we do have a few photon torpedoes. We're pretty well-stocked on weapons now, but half of our handhelds run on old ammunition, and that runs out. I've calculated that if we'd put the overall time and energy we spent the last six to twelve months on manufacturing and salvaging firepower into building our own ship, we could've built the type of vessel for long-term travel, the kind that could get us _all _out of here at the same time. But then again, if we'd gotten attacked by the actual fleet within the last year, we'd have been dead."

She takes another bite, talks around the chocolate chunk in her mouth. "Still. We're going to run out of luck eventually. If it had been up to me, I'd have taken the gamble. And Captain Spock's little ethical mid-life crisis is likely to do more harm to us than good. He's just making people defensive. You Terrans don't like to know too much about your precious space gang. They can get away with murder, and they do, they even murder each other; but you'd rather feign ignorance."

They all have to school their reactions to all that. Jim clears his throat. "What do you think of the captain, though?"

"What do you mean what do I think of him?" When she realizes that isn't explanation enough, she puts down a piece of chocolate like she can't have an appetite while she's talking about this. "You might get the occasional T.E. suit who doesn't know what he's doing. But he's Imperial fleet, and one of the highest-ups? That's all I need to know. I'd shoot him between the eyes if I got the chance."

"Even though he's not _hevam_?" Scotty says.

"What does that matter? Everyone knows he's half, anyway." Something in her eyes backpedals. "And I don't use that word. Well, I do, but only for a particular kind of human."

"I know," Scotty replies.

And Jim must really be drunk, because he says it out loud, interrupting with, "Have you ever had to kill anybody?"

She gives him a look that makes him wonder if that was rude. But then her response is squinting eyes and "Where do you think you are exactly?" And she's really peering down at where he's leaning against the couch, looking at all of them, seems to literally be trying to puzzle out where the hell they all came from.

Jim gets them on the subject of hooking up the viewscreen, and she's as eager as any of them to lighten up the mood. They prop the thing in the corner of the living room that not enough heat seems to reach, and then Jim and Bones wrestle immaturely over a shared blanket while Scotty and Jill settle on an early 22nd century western feature. Jim thinks he's seen it before, but he doesn't pay close enough attention, maybe not really wanting to see how this version ends. In some kind of postmodern statement it was produced in black and white, and the room hums in the monochrome and the blushing shadows of the light cast from the screen. Scotty is blowing hot air into his hands, and Jill, in a sort of defensively casual but shy way, takes his left between both of hers and rubs at it, softly trapping his fingers in hers on her lap. Jim can't help but see it happen in his sidelong curiosity, the way she doesn't look down at what she's doing, the way it comes off as something very daring simply because it's clear that it is to her. And how some spell is broken by the motion of Nyota returning to the room, making their hands self-consciously untwist.

"What the hell are you wearing your coat for?" Scotty demands.

"We're out of soap," she says with a dully rueful expression.

"Are you kidding?" Bones exclaims.

"It's not snowing now." She shrugs, but her eyes keep straying to the floor. Jim thinks something is up with her, the way she's been a little quiet all night. It's almost like seeing Jill and Scotty's affection prods a little too much at somewhere sore. As she's leaving the room before they can ask anything else, Jim gives Bones a nudge with his knee.

"Go with her."

Bones is looking at Jim as if he knows something he doesn't. "You could go..."

Jim ignores that. "Just go talk to her?"

Bones gets up to leave, crossing by Scotty and a very confused Jill who's now fumbling with the blanket across her lap.

She looks over at Jim. "Did I do something...?"

"Why do you think it's you?" Jim reassuringly waves her off.

"I have to ask, now that the doc isn't around..." Jill suddenly candidly speculates, "Are you trying to starve your way to that ship, Jim?"

Scotty lets out an impressed scoff that Jill just _asks_. Jim replies, "I'm not starving."

She squints at him for a second. "I know we have a conflict of interests, but you do realize...I mean, if we were to win it, we'd give you a ride off of here..."

"Right, but where would we go?" Scotty gives a little grim laugh. "Where are your friends going?"

"We know that there's a hidden colony out there, or at least there was once. We'll be lucky if we hear something back from this party, but everyone's going insane over us possibly figuring out if this place is actually safe for us...Though I have to honestly say I don't know how they're taking to abolitionist Terrans. It would take a lot of convincing to get some Romulans to even let you on their ship. I'm lucky enough I have a chance of getting out of here since I'm just a degenerate."

Scotty lets out a noise of irritation, calling back to something previously brought up between them. "For fuck sakes, I really hate that you put up with that."

"You realize that on Romulan a newborn with my type of defects would have been thrown out with the trash?"

"Jesus." In a drunken grumble Jim asks, "Who are your friends, that they let you talk about yourself like that?"

Sometimes it seems like Jill never stops shrugging. "Most of my real friends are like me."

That puts a damper on that, but suddenly Jill is brightening up with an idea that seems almost funny to her.

"Hey. Do you all wanna come meet them?"

"What, like..." Jim mumbles, "Go out for drinks or something?" like this isn't something he can easily picture.

"No, I mean do you wanna come see the Knot."

They're both slightly flabbergasted by the idea. "That's...allowed?" Scotty asks.

"Yeah. If you're escorted it's okay."

Scotty and Jim exchange little looks of suppressed enthusiasm, emanating with their helpless curiosity through their shrugs.

"Yeah. Hell yeah," Scotty says.

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They all meet up at the bridge over the lake on the weekend, and Jill grins at how they're rather nervously approaching, flicks her cigarette into the water and hops her way over to lead them in.

The two Romulans guarding one of the entrances do a body search while Jill chats with the one that seems friendlier than the other. Jim is getting a closer look at the appearance of the fencing that borders the whole Knot area, squinting in growing amusement at the whimsical irregular shape of it where it hasn't been replaced. "Was this already built when everybody came here?"

"It looks like it used to be an amusement park," Scotty speculates.

"A what?" Jill asks.

"Don't tell me they never had Disneyland on Romulus," Bones jokes, earning a light shove to his arm from Nyota.

"Jill."

The wary-sounding greeting comes from an approaching Romulan garbed in a checker weave and looking at her with tensely pinched features.

"Khamak." The man is handsome but in a decidedly boring way, and Jill acknowledges him with a polite smile, waving up the four behind her now that one of the guards has gestured they're free to go in. She stops as Khamak starts speaking to her in quick Romulan. Her response is nearly matching his natural speed with the language even if not quite fluent, and all Jim can tell for sure is she's calmly arguing with him. When she eventually slips back into Standard, it's like a dismissal.

"It's only two hours until curfew."

Khamak squints behind her at all of them. "I want your _hevai _out of here by then."

"Calm down," she waves him off with a grumble. Jim can't decide what level of familiarity she has with him; with her it seems like anything could mean affection.

None of them are really sure where she's planning to take them as they follow behind her leisured pace farther in, and Jim notices that the path they're following resembles an unnecessarily circuitous paved walkway, deciding, _definitely a theme park_, and finding it kind of a pleasant piece of unpredictability that the little town was built around some of the less efficient details rather than over them. Out of the bundles of homes or little workshops they pass by, some of them look like they were probably never torn down before, and he smirks at imagining the confusion of being confronted with all the gimmicky structures imitating everything from old-fashioned boat houses to European cantinas to small castles. Places that used to be gift shops that only looked like homey inns on the outside actually have people sleeping in them inside.

A woman twirling a small child between her arms shortly says hi to Jill on their way into some tavern, and Jim can't tell whether it's an actual business or something more communally managed, but none of them are thirsty or hungry anyway. Jill turns and gives a pat to the back of the head of a teenager who's sitting alone reading at a sizable table, muttering, "Of course it's just you here."

"The others are going late," the boy replies, and only glances briefly at the rest of them. His accent is extremely pronounced.

"'Running late.' Maybe they got held up. Look, everyone sit down, you're making me anxious."

They do, and Jim might as well ask, "So do you know how this place got started up?"

Jill sighs, uncertain of the specifics. "Around...less than ten years ago? Some humans started an underground slave-freeing system, managed to get a lot of people together out here who were willing to offer refuge to escaped aliens in their homes, but after a time it became clear that unless they could get off the planet somehow, the ex-slaves had nowhere to go. I'm not really sure how it transitioned from there, and we don't even know for sure what happened to those Terrans—As far as we know they were just regular citizens pretending to be slave runners who were actually buying people into freedom. But somebody was smart enough to do a good job getting the word out so that slaves who were only afraid of escaping because they had nowhere to go could know they do have somewhere. I think it's only been in the past five or so years that Terrans have been able to think they could actually live safely in the district, but most of that started miles away from the Knot, so I can't really explain it."

"Must have been a lot more guns going off back at the beginning," Nyota guesses.

"I kind of think it's funny, really, that the Knot is almost protected by the outside. You guys don't have the autonomy, and outside the other gate it's really abolitionism by reputation alone, but...with humans being so much more hesitant to go after their own?" Jill gives a thoughtful kind of grimace. "It gives us kind of a buffer. I don't think we could do this without that, and yeah, there must have been some time when we were protected by the outside too, and didn't even see it happening because we're shut up in here all scared. I don't know...I went outside the gate once just to see the town. I was glad to have my gun in case anyone strange was passing through, but nothing happened."

"Speaking of guns," Bones mutters a little darkly, and Jim realizes that he's looking at the young man entering the tavern who could not more obviously be a member of the League. Jill has her back to him and doesn't see him approaching, and Jim can only smile wryly over at Bones when it becomes clear he's headed over to them.

The Romulan, who looks a bit older than the boyish one already sitting with them, is wearing jeans, a pistol in a shoulder holster which looks like it was patched together after the death of something else made out of leather, and no shirt. His long neck is accentuated on the side by an elaborate and obscure tattoo that curves somewhere down like a bird's wing and appears, from what Jim can see, to cover up whatever neck brand must be there. Most of the Romulans around town keep their hair quite long, probably as a point of pride considering the chopped-off hair they saw on so many slaves, but this is the first ex-slave Jim's seen with a head of ropey dreadlocks. They hang to his chin around his narrow stubbled face, which at present has a distracted and impatient set to it as he shrugs out of his holster, sits down, places the weapon neatly at his edge of the table, and after shedding that symbol of his status sits back in a suddenly lazy demeanor and asks, "So where the fuck is Tom?"

"You weren't with him?" Jill asks.

"Wait, wait, that's right. He had to go up to the front gate. He's gonna be late."

"Everybody, this is Gene," Jill says with a sigh, having given up on introducing everyone at once. The newcomer gives them all a gesture that's genuine in its half-friendliness, and she adds, "And Alel's our youngest."

The young one, who has the closest to a traditional short haircut than anyone they've yet seen, resumed his reading minutes ago and hasn't so much as looked up since the newcomer came in. He now gives them all the briefest polite smile, his face falling quickly back to the stubbornly determined set to his eyes that gives his appearance some vague maturity. Gene gives Alel a sidelong smirk, and as if annoyed that he hasn't paid any attention to him since he walked in, nudges him in the arm with his elbow. Alel just gives him an irritated glance, his mouth pulling into the tiniest snarl-smile of very white teeth.

"So which one's your boyfriend, Jill?" Gene asks with a sneer.

"Which one's _your _boyfriend?" Jill rebukes in a grumble and an expression that probably only makes sense to a couple people at the table. "Scotty's right here. Bones is the good doctor."

In his long-suffering repression of annoyance at being called that almost constantly now, Bones gives a grudging wave.

"I'm his favorite patient," Jill declares.

"Where the hell did you get that idea?" he says with an actual hint of a smile under the roughness, getting a wink from her.

"And this is Nina. And Jim."

"Is Jim the asshole?" Gene is trying to be an asshole.

"You're just making stuff up now." Jill looks like she's regretting this entire damn thing.

"Did you run into Khamak on the way in?" Gene is shifting gears and she nods, with a look telling him it was about what he suspects. "I hope he brings it up to Tom. It's always great to watch them go at it."

"You are such_ child_, Gene," Alel mutters in response to that.

"You got something better for me to do?"

The young man seems to smirk to himself before mumbling something else, in Romulan. Across the table, Nyota lets outs a couple low laughs, and Alel looks at her in open astonishment. She winks at him, and Jim realizes from the slighted annoyance in Gene that he must not understand the language at all.

"Oh, here's that bastard..." Gene sits up taller to wave down at somebody behind them, "What happened?"

"l'll tell you later." The man who replies is already coming over Jim's shoulder. He's also armed, with what Jim notices to be the exact phaser that was confiscated from them when they arrived. He appears to be somewhat older than most of the league members Jim has seen; his expression is tired but easy, not so smug. He gives everyone a short nod. "I'm sorry, _rinam_, I don't have much time to hang around..."

He leans in to kiss Jill on the top of her head while she frowns dramatically. Jim is more sure by now he's the oldest of the group and immediately senses that he's particularly close to Jill from that kind of half-distracted familial affection. He notices also that she doesn't introduce them, as if she's told him enough about them to not really need to.

Jim finally asks, "So are you friends with the whole league, Jill?"

A couple laughs go out around the table; Tom is scoffing, "I hope not."

"Tom kind of _is_the league," Gene affords. "Most of us are a bunch of jerk-offs, though," he adds, seemingly with the hyperbolic description of anyone who has problems with their job.

Jill adds, "Of course Tom's been trying to get Alel on the league..."

Gene interrupts, "But Alel doesn't share," and there's a short rustling heard from under the table like a teasing jab of one foot getting quickly blocked by the other. But Alel's attention is caught as he looks Gene up and down with some new annoyed thought, and then starts to shuck off one of his busy layers of knit clothing. "I'm not wearing your itchy clothes," Gene protests. "It's too small."

"Everything you wear is too small. And is cold outside."

"_Fvadt_," Tom suddenly quietly curses, his eyes noticing something at the entrance.

"What?" Gene looks up, then his face falls into irritation and he grumbles, "Oh, it's _Ri'nanov_..."

"See you later, Alel," Tom mutters dryly, while Alel looks of more placid worry.

"No rush, man, we have about five minutes before she can even see us. She's almost blind now, isn't she?"

"Gene, shut _up_," Jill warns.

"It's not like she can_ understand _me."

And Jim realizes the presence of the slowly approaching elderly woman who is taking in the general presence at the table like some threatening spectacle rather than a group of people. She zeroes in on Alel as she mutters endless words he can't understand, some admonishing mantra of a curse or a plea. Alel is sighing and trying to say something to her as she comes up closer. After the initial futility of it, the kid just stands up, only giving a kind of warning glance at all of them as a form of goodbye on top of the motion of tossing his garment over Gene's shoulder before he takes the woman by the arm, giving soothing words as he gently leads her away and eventually out the door.

They all sit in a silence that isn't exactly awkward as much as impregnated with silent troubled exchanges. Jill's the first to talk, and says, "You need to get in those pants before it's too late, Gene."

It seems like the comment is Jill getting even for something and Gene lets out a long uncomfortable sigh.

"By all means," Tom adds in a more flippant tone, "get the little shit over his repression long enough to fuck him, so he can get tired of you and leave us all alone."

Before the rest of them can be blindsided by the harshness of that comment, Jill is coolly saying, "Ignore him, Gene, he's just being an overprotective little—"

"Why can't you trust him?" Gene directs the demand at Tom.

"Gene...Alel is still treating those two he escaped with like they're Mommy and Daddy and they can tell him what to do. It's like he needs somebody to hold his fucking hand. People like that don't..."

"You're not my daddy and I do what you tell me."

"That's cause you respect me," Tom replies, pointing sternly across the table as the conversation is waylaid by them smiling in affection. But Tom shakes his head. "And he's a good little churchgoer, and you know what they're preaching in there."

"How would I know when we're not allowed in?" Gene mumbles.

"Wait." Bones asks, "You're not allowed to worship cause you're all..."

Gene just responds with a clicking sound of his tongue, saying, "Yeah, not with these clinic stamps" as he indicates the back of his neck, and he's brisk and neutral about explaining, "D'era didn't make us, or whatever they say."

"We can still read about it, though," Jill points out, and it's clear from a shy defensiveness that she has probably read quite a lot. She shrugs, says with emphasis, "It's a beautiful religion. It just has a lot of dangerous ideas."

In a kind of afterthought, Gene starts to mutter, "Tom's probably right—"

"Gene..."

"No, really. Alel's gonna bloom up into a proper Romulan, his pseudo-parents will find him a nice proper Romulan girl, and their babies will be the purest little hundred percents. With the cutest little green cheeks...I should be happy for him, right?" Gene's whole speech is transparently bitter. "I mean, he's probably gonna make it off this planet faster than we are either way..."

"Why?" Jill demands, "Why do you think that?"

Gene sighs in a way that seems to indicate that this is a frequent debate.

"Because an economically fragile Empire that's way the hell over on Romulus is going to hear about a little clan of thieving pirating Terranized weaklings, and come storming through the mainframes with photons blazing just to come pick us up? The Romulans out there would probably see _all_of us the way Alel's family sees us, and even if there are some out there with family here, the people who are in a position to do anything about it aren't going to care. Stop breaking my heart with that stuff, okay?"

"I'm just saying—"

"We don't have anything to _give_ them. Some of the people here can't even _read_."

With the expression of someone only willing to resign from protest for the sake of dropping the conversation, Gene takes a long swig from Tom's water bottle. Acknowledging all the guests more fully, he grimaces at the whole table and says, "Wow, this really isn't much of a good time, is it?"

Tom and Jill groan simultaneously.

"We were just talking about this the other day," she explains, laughing a little. "Something bad always happens when Gene complains that he's not having fun."

"Like, that time that—"

Tom is interrupted by the sound of his comm unit beeping.

"I swear, if this is bad news..." He shakes his head, goes off a few steps to answer the walkie-talkie-like device.

Scotty and Nyota are asking Jill something, and after a second Jim leans into the direction of Gene, who takes a fast hint and secretively crouches forward a bit.

In an almost completely serious and businesslike manner, Jim says, "Have you tried flirting with other people in front of him?"

Gene blinks. "Has that worked for you?"

Jim cringes thoughtfully, offers, "I'm pretty sure it's worked _on_me..."

"Gene." Tom coming back to the table, clapping Gene on the shoulder. "Put that sweater on, you'll freeze."

"What's going on?" Jill asks.

Tom realizes something and is already coming back to the table. "You're the doctor?" he says to McCoy.

"Is somebody hurt?"

"No, somebody's dead. None of ours." Tom quickly waves off the alarmed looks. "Poaching hole alarm went off an hour ago. And, uh. It's not elk."

Jill curses, and is the first to shoot up out of her chair.

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Between the foothills and the expanse of the Knot neighborhood an area of more lightly wooded land spans the length of an acre or so, and they all follow Tom and Gene, as well as one other woman Tom commed up there, outside a back gate to where Jill warns all of them to look for white 'X's painted on the trees. Jim peeks down enough to see the contraption affixed below the east-facing side of the first tree that bears the mark; a primitive holographic image projects the appearance of grass and twigs over the gaping hole. If he shifts to get close enough to see through the weak web-like illusion, he can see it goes down enough feet to make for a potentially lethal fall.

Where they stop is at the fifth hole where a small team of people are already yanking the bottom base up by a set of ropes. Jim is too curious to avert his eyes, but his stomach turns in instinctive shock at the condition of the human body when it emerges.

Nyota makes a seething noise and turns away with her eyebrows going up. Alel also trips a little back with an unsettled look, which is the time when the others notice him lagging around and Tom demands, "What the hell are you doing here?"

After Alel's stubborn silence makes it clear enough he's not going to leave, Tom just leaves him alone with a shake of his head.

"Alright. Charlie's searching the body for explosives," Tom explains when the entire group except the woman have backed away, some of them leaning into something that might have once been used as a tall fence post. Tom is lighting one of the home-rolled cigarettes Jill sometimes smokes and having some side conversation with her before he says to Bones, "We were hoping you could have a look at the body, see if anything weird turns up."

Bones furrows his brow, opening his mouth wide before bluntly admitting, "I'm not entirely sure what the hell is going on here." The rest of them scoff as if they were waiting for _someone _to say it. "You think this person was a spy or something just cause he fell in a hole?"

"Not exactly."

"He couldn't just be some hiker or something?" Scotty asks.

"Even aside from having signs posted, it's common knowledge for the people living around the coast that you shouldn't mess around here," Jill explains. "If somebody ends up falling in a trap they were either trying to sneak in or around this place, or they're...really stupid."

Nyota asks, "Has this never happened before?"

"No," Gene says. "Well, we did lose one of ours. This group of dumbass teenagers used to come out here and dare each other to try to hop the holes. Which is really not that hard if you're pure Romulan, but one of them wasn't."

There is a collective look of distant regret about that, Jill saying, "I can't believe I can't remember her name..."

Tom squints. "It was like...Harper?"

"Parker?" Gene guesses. They don't ever come upon a solid answer before the very tall woman Tom called Charlie comes over to present a big bastard of a hunting knife that was apparently the only thing on the body, and then the group gets to work moving it into the town so that they can get to some medical equipment.

"The fall broke his neck," Bones is declaring many minutes later, shoving his hands in his pockets. "He also has a pretty big narcotics problem."

Gene says, "Huh." Next to him in front of the table the body is sitting on, Alel is giving the empty gaping gaze of the dead man's face a slightly troubled stare. He reaches out in a soft motion to close the eyes; as he takes his hand back to bury it in his pocket he has a self-conscious look, like he isn't sure why he did it. Gene gives him some sidelong curious expression just before the door to the little cabin, not for the first time, is assailed with the curious masses waiting outside. Alel sticks his head out for a moment and yells something Jim assumes is the Romulan equivalent of "Fuck off, there's nothing to see."

Jim steps over to Nyota for a moment. "What's that word I keep hearing them say?" He's referring to the only league members present who have been almost continuously speaking in the tongue since they fell in with the group. "Something like...'motchek'?"

She smiles as if she was just piecing it together herself. "_Match'k_. I think they're using it as a not quite derogatory word for...us. It's a plant that grows on Romulus. The fruit is similar to tomatoes."

Jim squints as she waits for him to get it. He thinks he does, and suddenly their dry smiles are identical. "Cause we bleed red?"

Simultaneously they make a motion like something balled in their hands being squeezed until it bursts, sniggering darkly.

Then everyone's eyes widen slightly: just next to them Gene is interrupted from a startled kind of laughing in front of a hesitantly grinning Alel by Tom snapping from halfway across the room: "_What did you say_?"

The two young men get all befuddled, Alel clearly being the subject of the demand, as if Tom picked up just one clip of a comment that set him right off.

Gene whines Tom's name all drawn-out, but Tom shouts at Alel, "You think that's funny?...Get out. No, get the hell out, I don't wanna see your face for the rest of the day."

Almost looking petulant, Alel gives Gene an uneasy rolling of his eyes and goes, while Tom gets back to whatever he was taking care of with a long stream of angry muttering. "_Arrogant little_..."

Jill is a mix of embarrassed and incredulously amused, stage-whispering, "I thought it was funny" to Gene.

He's giving her a grateful expression topped with a ruefulness. "I mean, it's funny cause it's true. I don't know my age, it's kind of a running thing that we could be the same fucking age for all I know."

"Yeah, but the way he said it like, 'At least I know how old I am.' It just sounded..."

"He wouldn't say it like _that_—"

"I know," Jill says with a cringe. "I'll talk to him."

Tom is hardly oblivious to the tone of the conversation, and even though he's still visibly fuming he lifts his head up from his conversation with Charlie to grumble in grudging amendment, "Yeah, take the night off if you want to run after him or—"

"Oh, I'm going," Gene tersely slips off from where he's half-sitting on the table.

"Fine."

"Fine." There doesn't seem to be any real wrath as Gene quickly leaves; he just barely gets out, "Nice meeting you all" before he slams the door behind him, and Scotty finds all of this rather amusing and has to take a minute to convince Jill that he isn't screwing with her when he abruptly professes to quite enjoying her friends.

Soon before they leave, Tom ends up coming out of an indecisive reverie to go over and single out Jim, who can't help disarming the hesitation with a dry remark before Tom says anything.

"You ever try meditating?"

Tom scoffs but grins a little and returns, "Have you?"

Jim's brow furrows over a stiff smile.

"Listen: From one overprotective asshole to another...I'm assuming you guys have the emergency comm number to reach us, right?"

"Uh. No..."

"I'll have Jill give it to you." After a second he quietly adds, "The thing is, with some of the stuff they're talking about on the broadcast, it could be a matter of time until the Terrans here are in just as much danger as we are, and this whole place...it shouldn't be so separated. I just want to make sure you know we're here to protect everyone in town. After all, it's not like you can comm the cops."

Before Jim can really realize his admiration and gratitude in response to that, Tom has already given him a pat on the arm and walked away.

Tom ends up announcing that he's sending out two large parties into the woods, one to find and tell the hunting party to go back home for the night, the other to look and see if anyone else is lurking out there. Jim is unable to gauge how much they really have to worry about, but the orders seem strictly precautionary; no one's looking very on edge about it. Still, as Jill breaks up the party offering to walk them all back, he finds himself really hoping the dead man was stupid, or at least doesn't have any friends out there.

Jill walks with them after the front gate back to their house, falling into step with the rest of them after a few minutes of her and Scotty lagging behind.

"Tom and I have stuck together the longest," she's explaining as they pass by the basketball court. "Gene we met on the way here...He was a state-owned nape, got put to work from a pretty young age doing prison security. I'm pretty sure the story is that he got into a fling with an inmate doing short time. The guy was able to come back about a year after his sentence was over and buy Gene into freedom under all the pretense of ownership. And they were together, I guess, until he wanted to come out here. He doesn't like to talk about it."

Bones is the one to ask, "What about the young one?"

"We don't know about Alel," she says, shaking her head. "We know he was probably working for some rich family fairly close by, but nothing about how he got captured and sold, where he grew up, anything like that. He and this old married pair just came limping into town about nine months ago, looking like death warmed over, wearing these ratty clothes; hardly able to say anything in Standard. Those two elderlies still hardly talk to anyone else. We assumed for a long time they were his parents from the way they acted with him, but no...It's always kind of odd with the true Romulans. But the stories I've actually heard from them are some of the worst. Like I'm almost happy I was born into it rather than having this one day of bad luck that ruined my life, you know?"

Bones is maybe stepping around the question he's actually asking: "Have you always been the only woman in the club?"

Jill slows, but doesn't stop walking. "That's not necessarily true. My friend that left a while ago, and there was Maria who I met last year...but she died."

"What happened to her?"

"She just...died." She says it so distantly, as if this isn't even about her: "The female spays have these heart problems. We're not sure why it's so much more common with girls, it's like...some genetic side effect of something they only tested on us. But sometimes..." She stammers, "People are surprised sometimes when they find out I'm one of them. Because of my age."

Jim can't bring himself to look at Scotty, at Bones or at anybody. He looks at the horizon, the chilling sky encroaching on them in the dusk.

Bones only replies, "Oh."

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None of them would ever try to say they didn't see it coming.

Jim finally dares to wonder what's happening when he's taking his break at Rosetta's which he usually spends outside, even in the cold air, resting against the wall or sitting on the rickety bench watching his breath snake through the air. He notices something that literally appeared overnight: right across the narrow road, a bluntly and brightly lined painting of an all-too-familiar visage is spanning gigantic and vibrant on the bricks; the angle of the brows and the coolness of the expression would seem intentionally authoritative if they were not perfectly accurate. The words "FALSE HOPE?" are the bold outburst below it. It's an oddly uncertain message to commit to propaganda, but it seems like a fitting step up from the former anarchic indifference that was all the politics of the place had to offer.

The recent events were these: Captain Spock of the I.S.S. _Enterprise _refusing to accept a personal appellation from the Empress for his economic brilliance, no doubt a monetary reward that would have come with the underlying message that he need not continue to serve the Empire in a similar manner. A refusal which, while worded politely, echoed through the media in ripples of astonishment, doubt, outrage; and apparently, in proximal regions, occasional daring hope.

Twenty days later, after an ambassador ordered a _rendezvous_ with private counsel to occur as soon as the _Enterprise _could be troubled to journey to a specified outpost, the captain allegedly falsified the directed location where the meeting would take place, beamed down privately, was reported later as missing and has not been found since.

Fueled by but not directly related to this enigma is the current debate about the proper action to be taken in response to the increasingly visible organizations of "anti-Terran humans." A certain ambassador whose name Jim can never recall has made the controversial proposal that any native Terran who neglects to place his loyalties with Terra should be treated accordingly; in effect, treated no differently from all other inferior races, even if it means treating them like slaves.

Jim is scrubbing down the body of an old hoverbike, listening to the debate on the broadcast.

"The notion that we would treat our own people like we do our enemies, it's just sickening to me. I know people who have family in that area, and certainly they don't agree with their philosophies, but it's not—"

"Oh, please, 'philosophies.' How much longer are we going to..._cushion _this flood of ideas under a lot of safe labels so that we don't have to face the effect they're having?"

"So you honestly think the Empire is threatened by a bunch of sad idiots living out in the woods? Or by this other group in Europe?"

"Do I feel the Empire _itself_ is threatened, of course I don't. But on the level of civilian life, they don't seem to realize what would happen if we suddenly became a bunch of bleeding hearts over our slaves and took off all the shock bands...As if they'd just gladly walk out the door without hurting anybody? These people are pushing the entire strongly constructed paradigm of our society directly into one of vulnerability—It's not that the fleet couldn't effectively intervene, it's that we're _Terra_ and they shouldn't _have_to."

"If both of you could let me interrupt, I think it's important to remark on the fact that our infamous Captain Spock is of course _not _human. If his actions are deliberately against the Terran Empire, do we really need to react in a way that hurts our own, or do we view him as an external threat?"

"Well, I could mention that his old comrade James Kirk was once quoted as saying he thought his first officer was much more human than Vulcan, but what do we even make of _him _anymore?—"

"Yes, how clever of you to place blame on a_ missing person_—"

"You really believe it's likely those four are dead? My bet is they're in hiding somewhere just like Spock, and the officials clearly seem to suspect as much even though they won't come out and say it—"

"Jim?"

He nearly jumps out of his skin at Brighton's voice. "Sorry...What?"

"I was saying, it's a slow day. You look pretty tired, why don't you pack it in for the night...Are you alright?"

Jim nods, and heads right for the bathroom to splash some water over his face, trying to calm down. And he leaves work, and he goes home to Jill and Scotty at the table in the kitchen, and he tells himself it's alright, even though he can't not worry that there's a ticking bomb under the floorboards, even though Scotty can certainly feel it too but doesn't show it at all because there's absolutely nothing else for it but to be the man he is, sit down, complain about the food, say hi to Jim like nothing's up.

And it's funny how nearly anti-climactic it all is; no switch-on or switch-off, no suspense. He isn't paying attention to what the two are saying after the point he manages for a minute to stop constantly monitoring the slow dry of the evening, misses what it is that might have tipped the scale, and it wasn't necessarily anything that anybody said. It could have been the simplest, most harmless idea, a new fact conjoining dangerously with an old one, two plus two plus two, and the last event is something closer and louder than anything anyone could say in the bustling spectrum of news and debates and the incongruous politics: as simple as Jill lifting her cigarette up to her mouth and the cigarette never making it there. The slowest lilt of her arm and her hand going heavy back down to the table is not an expression of surprise or confusion, just the snap and the falling leaf of a terrible, terrifying thought.

Jim knows before Scotty does, and that's just when the front door cracks open, and Jim makes for an exit from the kitchen. He comes up quickly intercepting Bones and Nyota where they're carrying in some food, his voice hushed low as he asks them, "Where's the phaser? We still keep it in the car?"

Nyota's eyes are going big, Bones simply ruffling his brows and replying, "I'm pretty sure it's in the kitchen, right?"

"Jim. What's going on?"

A sudden crash and something thudding a bruise against one of the kitchen walls, and everyone moves in alarm at the sound of Jill's inscrutable shouting, Scotty's weak protests that are nearly drowned out by accusatory curses and screams, and it doesn't take very long for the two to grimly understand.

"Oh Jesus," Bones says.

"—_you're all fleet scum_?—The engineer, right? It's all of you, isn't it, I swear, if you try to lie to me, you—"

"Jill, just listen to me!" Scotty must have to duck to avoid whatever metal object is flung violently across the room, along with anything else she can get her hands on; the other three can hear it as they're making their way to the kitchen. "It's—I have to explain, I was never T.E., it's not—"

"What's your name. Tell me your _name_."

His voice at an angry high, he snaps, "Montgomery _fucking_ Scott, but it's _not_ me! _Jill_—"

Something else thrown. "You don't fucking belong here, you can't just run in with your tails between your legs..." Her voice is seething and shaky when Jim finally gets close and peeks around the door, and there's something in her like she's still putting it all together, like she's only halfway to the worst this is going to get. "You fucking bastard. You'll all be lucky if I don't get the rest to come burn this whole house down with you in it, you—"

"_Listen_, dammit. There was an accident, we're not even from this whole...fucking—" Scotty kicks something. "We look like them but we're not them, alright, there was this transporter accident when—"

"How stupid do you think I am—"

"No. No, Jill, I'm telling you this 'cause you're smart enough to get it—"

"_Hevam_!" She spits it out in a scream, like the word has been devouring any other thought in her head. "You can go to hell. You think I've never been fucked over before? I'm not your little nape whore, it's not gonna work—"

"—Jim." Nyota's voice is urgent, quiet as she stops his movement. "No, don't go in there."

"What, are you—"

"No no, listen. If she was going to really hurt him she would've done it already." Her voice is emphasized with some unspoken warning to it. "Jim—!"

He goes in anyway, the others lingering around the doorway behind him as the two get out a couple more screams, and then Jill looks over to the rest of them, backs up for a second like a steaming cornered animal, looks at Jim, says, "_You_," and pulls out her revolver.

It's not the first time Jim has had a firearm pointed at him, but it's the first time it's come in such a back-handed and bitterly effortless way, and from someone he knows. As he's putting his hands up he's not used to the sickening twist it puts in his stomach, something that's far more sour than fear. The rest of the room is silent and seems to have left him.

"Okay." He swallows. "You're really gonna do that?"

She is. She comes up closer, retorts through her teeth with a mocking lift of her brows, "On your knees. Captain Kirk."

Scotty says her name again; it's imploring and quiet and somehow angrier this time, and she doesn't even hear it, just steps even farther forward and taps the barrel against Jim's head once he's down on the floor. She's looking at the others now, a terrible-sounding laugh ringing under her panic.

"Of course. How didn't I see this before? The engineer. The doctor...Oh. _Nyota_, right?" She says that name with such a magnitude of bitter mockery, like she wants to make sure none of them will ever hear it the same way again. "Uhura? The skilled communications officer?"

No one dares to say anything. Jill looks back down. "And your illustrious senior officer. Your good captain. Right? Now, listen. Why don't you tell _me_, Kirk, how many people were enslaved, and raped, and murdered, by people under your command—"

Somebody's begging, "No, don't do that, don't you _fucking_do that—"

"Under _your _command," Jill evenly repeats. "And I might think about being nice."

Jim isn't looking up anymore. Everything in his vision is his hands on the wooden floor in front of him, like he can't stand to look at everybody else. "Fuck you, Jill."

"Jesus, Jim, just _tell _her that—"

"Yes. I'm the captain," Jim interrupts, actually wanting to make sure she's not listening to anyone else. "Anything they did...It's my responsibility."

Curses of panic and protest as Jill looks at him in understanding, her expression not softening but dropping to some other resolve.

"Fine," Jill says. "They live. You die."

She pulls the hammer back on her revolver, and through the frantic snap of noise coming from all directions, one phrase strips through. Nyota's voice all loud and obscure and Jim's ears are so raw through the white tangle that it takes the coherence falling after the fact that he's not dead yet to realize he can't make any sense of what she's saying.

Jim crooks his glance up enough to see Jill's face, sort of angrily hesitant, glaring in Nyota's direction. "What did you say?" she quietly demands.

Something in Romulan; Nyota repeats it, then some variance of it, a line of frantically sobbed words.

Jill says something back in the same tongue, and Jim isn't understanding a word, but it sounds like a clarification, something with an undertone that's vaguely warning and threatening, but also something weakening.

Another stream of words from Nyota; that same litany again, and then simply: "_Please_."

Jill's grasp on her pistol has not shaken once. Jim has been practically certain ever since she pointed it at him that she was going to shoot him, that she badly _wanted_to shoot him, and everything in her face and her body seems to be fighting against that want as she takes in and lets out a breath with a slight furious whimper underneath, steps back. Slowly, then surely lowers the gun.

The rest of the room seems to collapse into walls all at once. Jim is still staring forward and down for a moment, is finally moved when his shoulders are grasped into a sloppy embrace by one of McCoy's arms. Nyota has slid slowly all the way to the floor where her back is against the fridge, hands crowding over her forehead as she seems to gasp for air.

When Jim finally looks up at Jill, it seems like she's snapped out of something. Scotty is glaring at her. She almost looks fearful when she meets his eyes, some first time and some last time breathing at once in the icy air between them.

"Get out," Scotty says.

She opens her mouth—

"_Get out_!" he shouts.

No one tries to take her gun, or go for their phaser under the sink. Jim doesn't even realize this until he looks up again and Jill's gone.  
**  
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	4. Sleep Now In The Fire

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chapter 4

**sleep now in the fire**

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Some time after midnight she starts to realize that no one has asked her what it was she said to Jill before.

She's in the back behind the passenger seat, in which Jim has his head lulled far back and one hand still where it stopped in the middle of combing up through his hair at some point and an elbow knocked tiredly to the window. Scotty on her left and Leonard in the driver's, and they're parked down the street from the house, just close enough that they'd pick up on it if anything happened.

It's the break after a long uneasy silence when Leonard and Jim get to talking again.

"Nothing's going to happen. We've been out here half the night." Jim's voice is brittle, a little angry under the stubborn certainty.

Leonard makes a worried sigh. "She said—"

"She isn't going to tell anybody. If Scotty thinks she isn't, I'm pretty sure she isn't."

Scotty's voice is rough when he puts in, "Look, I'm just wondering...If they start putting our pictures out there..."

"I'm sure they already have. Luckily, she's one of the only people we know around here who really pays attention to that stuff. She's the only one who _knows_us. The point is, I would fucking guarantee you there are other people around here who have looked at us and thought, maybe. But if we start acting like something's up, if we suddenly try to skip town, they're not just going to be thinking maybe anymore." Jim explains all of this like he'd rather not talk about anything at all right now. "We put our noses down and act like we've always been acting. It may not be much of a plan, but it's all we've got."

In response to that last part he gives a glance around the car, his impatient invitation for any other opinions. And with a somewhat daring indifference, opens the car door.

"What are you—"

"I have work in the morning. I'm going to bed." Jim slams the door behind him, and even though they're all so wound-up that the cool night air seems to threaten a feeling of enclosed safety in the vehicle, nobody tries to stop him.

Only a few minutes later, she follows. She shivers through the silence of the dark neighborhood, walking home in her cheap sandals, sighing as her body realizes its exhaustion when she puts in the code to open the back door.

He's already in bed when she crawls in after, his back facing her and his body unmoving as if he's already fallen asleep. She slides her body in under the blanket and then fluidly moves in close, drawing her arms around him and burrowing her face between his shoulders, a shaky breath going out and going in and going out again.

Now he moves; his body turns into hers and he lets her hold him tighter that way, just squeezing into him, making sure he's there. Just for a moment he draws back to push her hair out of her eyes, looks kind of numbly searching into them; with that same nearly unfeeling curiosity, he slips his body down enough to press his lips onto hers. He kisses her once, and again, three times. She only passively kisses him back. As if he's looking for something and she's merely letting him look for that thing.

He searches for whatever it is until they fall asleep, and somehow they do that awful night, waiting for somebody to come and burn the house down.

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1 YEAR.

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On the first day of spring she helps Leonard communicate with a patient, a child with a broken foot and a worrisome older sibling. She sticks around in the kitchen afterward, eventually opening the back door and sitting on the one step into the yard.

"You think we'll have to build a fence if we get the ship?" Leonard asks quietly as he pulls up the one chair they have outside and sits on it backwards.

"I guess we will," she says, smiling tiredly. "Unless they figure out how to fix it up and fly it in one day. Though it depends. How easy is it to steal a vessel?"

Shaking his head, scratching the back of it, he shrugs. "Well. Hell if I know."

She smiles with a little shake of her head. Then she clears her throat after a moment. "What do you think about Jim?"

He looks at her uncertainly, something hesitant in his eyes.

Pressing her lips together, she just shrugs. The house and the outside is very quiet; birds chirp in the mild cold, and everything they say feels a little too gentle, too naked. "He's just having a hard time, I guess," she says in some attempt to console herself.

"He almost got killed. And not in a way he'd like to go, that's for sure." The doctor shakes his head up somewhere, pleading at nothing. "I don't know what to tell you. I would've been giving him anti-depressants months ago if we had any."

"I'm sure he'll make it out of this, though." She says this figurative assurance like she just needs to hear it, even if he won't say it too. "I mean. He's good with this stuff, right?"

Before Leonard sorts together a response to that, she comes out of the silence with a hesitant noise, speaks with a dark and distant note.

"You know. That place you were in, when you realized that you weren't going to see your daughter again. Like you accepted it all at once, that this is where we are. Scotty got there on his own at some point, I'm sure. And maybe Jim's there now. But me...It's like I'm still waiting for it. And I don't understand it, because it's like I _know_, but I don't know."

When she stops staring off into the sparsely grassy field that is their yard, she realizes Leonard looking straight at her. He asks, "What happened when you went to Pemba?"

She sits up a little, not sure what he's asking.

"It's just that I have to admit I was a little relieved at how fast you turned around and left."

She thinks she understands the implication. "It wasn't my mother. I'm not fooling myself there. Those people we left on the _Enterprise_weren't our crew. We're alone, and I know it. We're so completely alone, but every morning I wake up and it's like I've forgotten that...This old life is still at the back of my mind, and it won't quit. It won't leave."

The next day it's her and Jim in the kitchen, the others out working while the big debate hollers over the audio system; they're finally listening to the news now, but they still don't talk about it. Jim's making breakfast while she sits at the table, both of them heavy in their silence, the meaning of some chancellor's words ticking a foreboding rhythm through the room.

He turns off the burner and a couple minutes later is sitting down next to her.

"Are you scared?" she asks, very quietly, just as he's reaching for a knife.

His movements pause; he looks at her, then looks away somewhere, organizing his plate and his fork and he faintly, finally replies, "When am I not scared?"

He pushes the other plate in front of her: one of the only eggs they've seen all year and also some of the bread he's been trying to save.

"Thank you," she says, for the cooking. He gives her a softly accustomed look in response, and they pretend they aren't listening to politicians rather sportingly toss around the last shreds of their peace of mind for the duration of a tacit breakfast.

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The law gets passed.

She finds out when most of Brighton's employees are taking lunch where he lets them hang out outside of his office, keeping mostly to herself as she hasn't worked often enough to really be acquainted with many of the workers, and Scotty's still outside putting off his breaks as usual. Everyone's crowded around the broadcast, and it doesn't take her long to realize why.

_"Mazel's proposition, now in effect as international policy, has spurred the onslaught of a number of actions immediately being taken by the Empire; the potentially alarming element to these changes we are immediately seeing is the invitation being issued by these new policies to have any people act promptly on the civilian level to help arrest and identify any humans who have engaged in clear actions of anti-Terran activism, a distinction already set forth by the bill's public section._

"The empress makes it clear that enslavement of these individuals is not only permissible but a safe solution to the troublesomely casual presence of potentially dangerous aberrants that have become increasingly visual in the past few years. While governmental bodies will be reacting on a step-by-step rate in condemning these individuals, the duty of our citizens to the Empire is to do everything they can to help identify them, even if only on the small level of branding them; the law proposes this as a practical way to ensure that the most threatening groups of these people cannot adopt pretenses and simply return to living as Terran citizens; a simple 'X' shape anywhere on the person's neck is sufficient to identify an individual as an enemy of the Empire, and relatively easy to produce..."

At some point Nyota's hand came slowly up and covered disbelievingly at her mouth as she stood very still, as the rest of the room followed her into a solemnity that she only snapped out of when Scotty was suddenly at her side, his expression wary. For a second they said nothing; she put her hand at his shoulder as if to make sure she had him where she knew he was.

They go back to work.

They go back to work, until Brighton pops his head into the storage room around dusk, shouting.

"The border's been compromised. Everyone get home to your families."

Scotty's muttering some curses when she finds him again; when they're walking down the business block, he pulls at her sleeve and they go into an alleyway, avoiding the clearer channels of streets where it isn't long before they first catch sight of a mammoth tank of a vehicle roaring in, not bothering to target anyone in sight but, they soon realize, driving straight for the Knot.

After weaseling between buildings in no particular direction that isn't simply away from the main road and into the darker pockets in the shade, she knows something's going on in Scotty's head. Suddenly remembering something, she asks, "Do you know if Jim's home?"

"He was working Rosetta's, wasn't he?" he replies, stopping as if to catch his breath with a hand rested on a picnic bench in the shadowy courtyard. "I'm sure he'll head home."

Nyota pulls in and lets out a long breath, steps up closer to him. All she says is, "Scotty."

He's shaking his head in a troubled way before he looks at her, and just nods to himself, says, "Right." For a moment after that dazed and senseless word she searches him, and then swallows.

"...You're going to the Knot." That sinks in while a couple other slaver trucks are heard; the first ringing blast of gunshots from some obscure direction. Her nerves jump at it, only making her reply sooner, "Okay," not so much saying okay as _Give me a minute to think about just what the hell you're saying_.

A couple enraged people shout in the distance, small and ineffectual; she really doesn't know what to make of the fact that this can only get worse. They exchange a multitude of comments in eye contact alone, all the arguments for why she should be okay, why she definitely might _not_be okay; what she ends up saying is, "And your plan is to go in there and drag her out, and hope that Jim or Leonard is able to just swing by with the car and pick you up?" She understands. She noticed when she was at the Knot how insecure so many of the homes are, how small and easy to find the few bunkers were. The whole idea of it is ugly. The stupidity of assuming they'll be able to do anything about it notwithstanding, she knows there's no way she'll be able to talk him out of this.

She says, "Okay," and it means something else this time. "But we should move now. The phaser's at the house; we'll just have to find something we—"

"Leonard wouldn't even—Wait. Who's _we_?"

Nyota is already walking.

"Waaait, wait. Nuh-uh. Can you even imagine what Jim would do to me—"

"What _about_Jim?" she demands, turning back around. "You tell me how he'd feel about me coming home without you saying I'd let you go off and do something this crazy. I'll deal with Jim. You're doing this with me, or not at all. Make a decision."

He starts walking with a bit of an angry determination in his step; she takes that as a yes, but doesn't understand why he's headed straight off towards the northern lot until he says, "We need weapons."

She understands; within their range, the best place to find anything that could be used for defense is most likely to be in people's cars. As they reach the small lot with nine or so vehicles parked there, but no people, she starts to ask, "How will we...?"

He goes straight for the pole in the corner of the lot, and Nyota realizes the big power box on it is part of the system that boosts comm signals in the area. As Scotty wrenches it open and starts messing around with all the switches and keys, she doesn't have time to ask what he's doing before he's telling her to go to the nearest vehicle and try to open the trunk on his mark.

"What—?"

"I can make a short burst of a jam signal that the cheaper security systems react to like it's being unlocked. Go."

At the first vehicle, she presses up until he yells "Now!"

Somewhat comically, even when the trunk she's pressing at doesn't budge, she does hear a chorus of tweeting and clicking, and a few of the trunks in the lot are automatically hovering open. "Um. I'll check these two over here."

When she's done ransacking and then squinting through windows to see if anything good is on the seats, she comes back with an empty-handed frustrated gesture. Scotty has found a long metal handled object that he immediately shoves into her grasp. "Maybe we'll get our hands on something else later."

Not bothering to ask why he chose to give it to her, she follows as they take off again for the long way back east-side around the thronging noises coming from the central neighborhoods of the city, the roars of machinery and screaming and the very occasional but stomach-turning glinting noise of phaser fire sometimes overriding the occurrences of old-fashioned bullets.

As they approach the Knot, the place seems in a sudden way to be closer than perceived, from the fact that the widely surrounding gates are so affixed in their spacial understanding of the entire area; the main clearance gate has simply disappeared, as if something already barreled a huge section of it down. Nyota's anxiously pulling her comm unit up to her ear, but Scotty gives her a grim shrug, saying, "I commed home after I was trying to reach Jill. I haven't heard back yet."

She doesn't know why that sinks in sharp and worrisome in her mind, but it does. "Leonard was home. And...Jim should have..."

"Leonard could have been out," Scotty points out. "I'm sure they'll get to the house soon, and...when we find her, it shouldn't be hard bringing the car over..."

"...God. If this gets bad—"

"It'll be alright. We just—"

"We have to move."

Getting into and around the Knot is only difficult because of the congestion of the crowds attempting to get out that they seem to encounter in waves, eventually instinctively reaching to clutch hands so that they don't lose track of each other. The presence of the slavers is only peripherally apparent for much of their search so far, the madness and panic evident in the faces going by giving away whatever threats are happening farther in, until the two turn a corner and immediately jolt back at the sight: a helpless pile of unconscious Romulans being bound and carted up into the cargo compartment of a private trade vessel. Nyota takes note in the split amount of time that one of their own is injured, having noticed a mess of a bloody body being tended to by another.

"You know where she lives, right?"

Scotty nods. "Her shop is almost at the end, past the trade clearing?"

She lets out a dreading sigh; the entire place isn't considerably huge, but in this mess, that far feels like miles. He takes her with an affirming grasp on her arm and they go off where he leads, keeping against structures and walls, trying not to look_ too_scared, for that small hope of being mistaken for slavers by the other humans.

What they're wading through in the next several minutes would seem to be the gap between those who are running and the point that everyone is running from; they encounter only small groups of Romulans slipping by them with no care, occasionally glancing at them suspiciously from windows before ducking back out of sight. The wail of a sobbing infant ghosts from somewhere, the last noise among the desolation before Nyota stops in the middle of trying to comm home again at the realization of a much louder clamor a block or so ahead.

From what they do hear they end up simply giving each other dreading looks before they make themselves creep in closer to the outskirts of the mess partly illuminated by the weak light posts.

Next to the market tents and the lookout tower in the Knot there is a large clearing that is slightly past the middle of the whole camp, and approaching here is where the figures in the distance come into a cleaner view of violent, snapping motions. She wants to tell herself it's just a handful of citizens who were reckless enough to come out here, she thinks, These people are going to die. And she may be right, but in this waning distance from the battles there is still the body lying face down with the elegiac form of two mountainous shoulder blades cringing up under the white tunic fabric, the sight of more of them collapsing after the occasional lethal gun blast, arms flailing and falling and going limp in every direction; and Nyota's seen some things before she wishes she could burn out of her memory, but not like this. This is like something out of a book, a war, but the kind that's somehow only worse for being nearly insignificant. This is not history, and it makes her feel like the entire place is choking and dying.

"Okay." She balls her fists tight into her palm and around the hard handle, clenching and unclenching and "How are we going to get around this? Are you sure she'd even be at her place?"

"_Fuck_if I..." Scotty's frantic laughter trails off. "But she...She wouldn't be up there." He shakes his head.

She spots the couple that's huddled behind one of the small cabin houses and is already approaching them. Scotty quickly follows suit as she's shouting, "Listen, we're looking for Jill. Do you...?"

She attempts a couple lines in Romulan when that gets them blank stares; when there's still nothing, Scotty yells, "Jill. The metalsmith, do you know her?"

They still get no response and then, just a few structures down, the pull of a chase appears in shadows preceded by the bodies: two Romulans pursued by a vehicle. Scotty and Nyota jump back under the shadow of the close awning, and something snaps out and latches around the slower Romulan's foot: a body jolts down, limp, spasming in a brief wave of electrocution as the car pulls over and a human hops out of the back, pulling a gun on the other Romulan who cuts back fast, fearlessly crowding in and smacking the gun out of his grasp just as he takes a shot: Nyota looks away when a Romulan hand insinuates at the handle of a jaw, hearing the crack of bone and a body slamming into car metal as Scotty's encouraging her in a new direction.

They skulk around an edge of the clearing while everyone is veering away from the jerking turmoil of another vehicle where a group of armed Romulans is crawling up all over it like spiders, smashing rocks into the windows and screaming an endless chant of threats as they attempt to violently dissect their way through the car to the people inside. One Terran hops and tries to claw his way up a nearby panel of fence, gets a phaser blast that drops him to the ground where Scotty and Nyota trip around him, running with their hands connected and she's beginning to realize maybe they're headed to the tavern that's connected to Jill's shop, seeing if she's hiding in there.

"You haven't seen anyone we know...?"

"No," Scotty says.

All the while, an occasional new ton of metal has arrived, either a truck-like hover vessel or smaller ships landing in from the sky in increasing measures; finally when a vaguely diamond-shaped and slightly larger vessel comes in with an ominously sophisticated and unassuming look to it, Scotty says, "Let's get in there _now_."

"What is it?"

"I don't..." Scotty shakes his head. "I don't know for sure, but I think those are a fleet model."

A small car that's been successfully hijacked by some Romulans is whirring around, enabling a reckless trigger-happy escapade that gets a few slavers in the dirt but also gives some Knot people a run for the shadows, and Nyota and Scotty catch some curious looks from the little group taking refuge behind the same waste barrel.

This is where they are when one of the diamond vessels touches down only a yard away. A small ramp drops down, letting out a handful of people, and the undeniable sharp vision of those uniforms: a bit more ruggedly built than the clothes worn by the part of the fleet they were part of for a while, but unmistakably Imperials. All of them have phasers; some of them have rifles, and many also have...

Scotty has put a steadying hand on her shoulder at some point. "You see those things they got...They look like a combination of a phaser and a branding iron?"

"...Yes."

"Well, that's...That's pretty much what they are."

One thought trips into another; she fearfully snaps, "Why the _hell_isn't anybody comming us back?"

"It's alright. Nee?" He waits for her to look at him in response to that not often used—and occasionally but not always annoying—nickname. "I'm sorry—I shouldn'ta gotten you into—"

"_No_," she retorts, as if in disagreement with something more concrete. "To hell with that. We're finding her, okay? Let's keep moving. Now, look, I think you better take this. It's pretty straightforward as weapons go, whatever it is, but you can still hit harder. It's not like we're getting separated, right?"

He complies, and as if to take their mind off of how insane it is as they're moving from a somewhat decent hiding place into the mere hope that somebody won't come after them, mutters, "You've never seen a baseball bat before?"

She squints in curiosity through her breath all elevated in fear. "Um. They still have baseball here?"

"Ah, it's not very Terran of you not to like baseball, Nyota."

"Oh. Well, maybe they'll let us off the hook for having it, then." It's a terrible joke and from up ahead his hand squeezes around her wrist as if he's laughing, and she almost wants to cry. As they reach one of the nearby shacks and Scotty seems to be contemplating making a run for it, she asks, "Is this the shop?"

Scotty nods. They're crouched down behind a stack of crates, peering over it to where the small building is across a stretch of road in plain sight for all around; the area they're in has died down in volume, as if everyone is still here but hiding, which means so are the fleet soldiers, she assumes with a guarded tensing of her jaw.

"On my mark, okay?"

She nods.

When he gives it, they fling up and dart across the street, pulling each other in a wordless change of plans between the shop and the next building rather than going in, taking cover in the channeling alleyway; both check around the back of both shacks, seeing nothing, but immediately flitting around opposite corners when they hear a kick of motion approaching their location.

Across the gap now being approached by the heavy sound of footfalls, Scotty and Nyota look at each other. She gives him an intent look, as if pleading for him to follow her lead, then kicks just a bit of dust out into the view of the alley, starts creeping back.

Her heart's pounding and a voice in her head frantically pleading when the figure appears, rugged paneled uniform fabric and a hand gripped firm around a phaser, but it works: He barely has a chance to see her before the couple swift steps and the sharp sound of the bat blowing to the back of his head, and he's out.

She sees she's by a window, ducks down, then both of them are peering just up at the edge for anyone inside. It's the half that houses the tavern area; the small bar at the corner as well as the rest of the room has no lights on. Scotty anxiously decides to go in, and creeps in ahead of her, slowly opening the door.

They make it a few steps in, trying to squint around in the dark. Scotty tries, "Lights at ten percent." Just as the system complies, a body is up and slamming him to the floor.

A woman in a rage is cramming in Scotty's neck under her hands. Nyota darts into a shouting of protest and assurances, eventually yelling, "_Daelennsu. Daelennsu_! We're friends! Please!—"

"—Stop!" A voice is shouting the woman's name now, coming forward and quickly urging her into some composure; she quits her throttling with an expression as if the meaning of what Nyota was shouting is now catching up to her, and a couple other Romulans are coming out of the woodwork as Scotty noisily coughs for air.

The second one who came out looks at the two humans, not looking exactly happy that they're allies, but settles on telling Uhura, "Your accent's lousy." She just barely has the presence of mind to roll her eyes.

She doesn't recognize any of the other people who've appeared in the chance she gets to look before somebody commands the lights back off. She puts a hand to Scotty's shoulder through his lingering gasps, says, "We're looking for somebody. Do you—"

The front door of the tavern is kicked open. Two figures appear before somebody barks, "Lights on full...Oh, what have we here?"

She scrambles across the floor just enough to try to tell the Romulan who has a small child with her to run like hell, which is an urge she abandons when she sees that the two civilian slavers have a firearm. Scotty and she instinctively move together a little rather than backing up into walls as the rest of the room does. The slavers have northern accents, are wearing something like camping or hunting gear, and one is a red-haired woman, the other blond but looking like he could be her brother and cocking a brow of some kind of delight when he notices the two fellow humans. The two exchange similar looks.

"I'll get it." The man is throwing down a backpack and opening it in a snap of motion while the woman trains the phaser right at them. She doesn't give any macho bullshit about telling them to stay put. Neither of them have to say anything to anyone in the room as it stills under the un-worded threat of the weapon in her hand.

But she does stride up in a half-bored swagger, and asks Scotty, "Whatcha doing here?" in mock-innocence. "Hmm?"

Scotty has that crooked set to his jaw, and only there, that look like someone isn't worth being more than a bad taste in his mouth. Nyota's seen it before; she wishes she could remember when, something among the things that happened only over a year ago, all feeling like a lifetime ago now.

"You work in the dirt with these napes?" the redhead asks, wry. "Fight for them like a good little dog?...You drink that piss they call ale or just settle for their piss?" The blond snickers.

"Oh my, lassie, you're_ clever_," Scotty grunts. "Did you spend the ride over here cooking that one up?"

She squints back, tilting her head and then evenly asks, "Do you fuck them?"

That makes something a bit harder ride into his expression. "And how's the weather under the Empire's bawbag? 'Cause clearly that's the only piece in the sack you ever get, lady, and you're talkin' to a man with_ evidently_low standards."

The woman even looks a bit icy in the eyes with chagrin when that makes her cohort laugh, but the laugh is mostly deprecating: "Oh, he's gonna be _fun_..."

"Do her first," the redhead dictates, and his eyebrow goes up; Scotty shifts next to Nyota, but she's already seen it, the device that the man came up tossing and catching by the handle like it was his favorite hand-held converter, has already been trying to get eye contact with him...

"Yeah, how about it, smartass?" the blond snarls at Scotty. "You get to watch while we brand your girlfriend here."

She just barely manages to stop the outraged line of curses ready to snap right out of Scotty by saying his name, low and solid, only looking at him as he looks over. "It's okay," she says, her voice not as shaky as her entire body feels, and she only looks at him for the next few seconds, not at the man approaching. She nods at Scotty. "It's okay." A bruising grasp at her arm and she's snatched up, and that's when Scotty starts shouting and shouting and doesn't stop.

It's just the wood of the floor coming hard against her shoulder blades before she's up on her hands and the fingers that are yanking her hair off one side, the sting at her scalp from pulling too hard. These seem to hurt more than the actual thing coming against the side of her neck, with the way her mind just falls away in the next moment: it goes so slow and so fast and what she's focusing on is the cheap wood and Scotty's litany of swearing and threatening and screaming that becomes this white-hot noise with the white-hot rip when she can feel the exact 'X' shape kissing obscenely into her skin, until she's part of the noise and takes a second to even realize she's screaming now, raging, kicking and gnawing a couple lines into the floor with her ankles. It's like she has this scream that's been dampened up in her chest with one terrible thing at a time and now that she's started she can't stop. Maybe it's only two seconds after it happens, but it's not even the man that lets go of her but his limp hand once the bullet drives through his head, and she breathes in again with a gasp at the body hitting hard to the floor.

Then again and the woman is dead with one snap of a bullet. One of the Romulans in the room cries out someone's name; she looks toward the doorway and there's one wearing a woven tunic, surveying around him urgently. And behind him...

"_Alel_?" She shouts it at the same time Scotty does, is on her shaky legs and going over to him before she thinks, throwing out too many questions at once, grabbing the young man by the shoulders.

Alel is a wreck. His face is all pinched up as his back collapses into the wall as if he needs somewhere to toil, angrily vulnerable. She notices a continuous bloodied stain down his hands and forearms, the knuckles richly red. He looks like he's been crying. That usual glint of determination in his expression has been amplified to a quiet fire of fury.

She tries to be comforting rather than assail him when she starts asking in Romulan, "_Where are the others? Were you with them?..._"

He doesn't reply in Romulan; it's as if he's too dazed to sift one set of language from the other, as if he doesn't remember she can speak and understand it, as if he doesn't know who he's talking to. He groans a dazed and grieving "He told me to keep hide, not to come out. Not if I heard or saw—He made me _swear_..."

"Who? Who did?..."

Her eyes widen at the almost drowned-out chirrup that makes her lean down and snap up her communicator. "Hello!"

"God dammit to hell, Nyota, this tracking system had better be malfunctioning."

She backs up off Alel a bit once Scotty catches over to them and sees that she's talking on the comm and takes up trying to talk to Alel. All she can say back is, "Leonard..."

"Please tell me everyone's alright."

"We're fine, but...I think something happened to Jill and—"

"Listen—Put Jim on, I need to ask—"

"What? Jim isn't with us. Jim isn't there?" The bad feeling has sunk to a terrible one, as she realizes the silence of Leonard having similar worries on the other end.

"No, Jim ain't home. He left his comm at the house like he's always doing, so I can't...Look, the two of you should just try really hard to blend in, you're human, I know it's not—"

"I can't." Even though he can't see her, she's shaking her head and shaking her head. "I can't do that."

"Why?"

It comes out bad-tasting, bitter and sudden through her teeth. "Because I got branded."

Silence. More silence.

"...Leonard?"

"Stay together, and try to move around as little as possible."

"What—"

"Whatever you do, don't lose your comms, you got that?...I'm coming to get you."

.

.

.

.

Alel all but robs the man he came in with of his phaser, giving some pleading apology to him as he does it, and Nyota and Scotty are pulled along in some direction she follows with the assumption that Scotty got a bit more of an explanation from Alel than she did, but she knows they don't have time to repeat it to her.

The Imperial traffic seems to have increased in terms of the number of ships when they get outside, the largest tangle of conflict having sifted from the trading area to closer to the very back of the Knot, as if the Romulans had some planned strategy to drive as many intruders as possible in that direction. Alel leads them back there, constantly flitting his glance around as if looking for something, employing his decent aim to shoot down almost anyone who's also armed before their human vision picks up on any of them. They have to back into somewhere for refuge when one of the vaguely tank-shaped fleet shuttles comes by; the small vessel gets rushed by a couple fighters and Nyota sees the click-shine, something glass with flame gnawing wick, just in time to yell, "_Get down_!" before the well-launched cocktail blows out the windshield in a spraying burst of fire.

Then they're rushing on and on and they've reached the very back fence, and this is the time the Knot decides to blow one of their torpedoes at an incoming fleet vessel. The flitting light comes straight from the high lookout tower back at the clearing, blows off the entire point of the diamond shape; it spins, hits another ship, sparks off the bump and starts spinning down like a frisbee.

"Oh shit," Nyota hears from Scotty just as they realize it's going to take out the back fence: It comes down with a thunderous crunching crash, sliding along the top of the gates some fifty yards south of them until it crashes into the ground; the point of destruction on the fence rings a noise all along the length of it, as the entire back poles whine forward in the aftershocks. Everyone realizes just in time that they need to run the hell away from it, feet flicking off in instinct, and when she's coughing up a bit of dust that gasps up under the endless thud of metal just at the edge of her body where she's run to the northern side of a destroyed vehicle, she inches back and looks around and tries to scream when somebody yanks her into a cruel grasp.

It isn't fair it isn't fair it isn't fair; Scotty and Alel are on the _other side_ of the _fucking car_and this hand is clamped over her mouth and she can't produce a screaming enough whine through the suffocating fingers, and it doesn't matter: She feels the tip of what she knows is a phaser at her temple, looks down to her scrambling feet enough to see the combat boots, black pants, a red shirt...

She submits to the forceful directions and the motions are snatching them out of sight, behind the long line of shacks before Scotty could even think to look in this direction. She makes a helpless protesting noise, gets a rude shove to her temple and keeps walking; when they've stopped somewhere just a small block away, she realizes they're next to one of the fleet shuttles, and one of the soldiers turns and gives an almost bored look at both of them.

"Sympathizer. Saw her running with a Romulan. And she's already branded."

The lean figure who comes forward is unpleasantly pale, with one dark orb of an eye and the other covered in an old-fashioned eye patch, slick brown locks down to his chin, the appearance overgrown and hermit-like. She looks stubbornly at the ground in front of her but can't help checking the short glance at him when his appraisal of the other man's find seems like something deeper; but then he looks at the other and says, "Well, good work, ensign. Just put her in the back with the rest."

She's yanked and then dropped in the large cargo compartment of the shuttle, which only gets enough light to vaguely glaze the appearance of some others who have been thrown in here before the compartment is slammed shut and goes pitch black. For a second there is merely a horribly empty sound of many people breathing, no one talking; and before she can even think of what she'd say to any of them, she hears one of the men stepping back around to the door, as if entertaining a second thought of something. Quickly craning her neck over to try to hear through the wall, she catches the man of higher rank telling the ensign to go wait in the cockpit. He complies with only an undercurrent of confusion, and Nyota feels a sinking dread as the compartment is clicked open and the door whirs back up.

Up the short ladder and the heavy boots step in, stopping leisurely next to her scraped knees; from his grip, a light shines right into her face. It doesn't move until she submits to the harassing hint for her to look up at him, her chest heaving and eyes squinting and defiant.

The lieutenant bends down just a little; as the blots in her vision clear a bit, she sees the wheels turning in the man's expression.

"Don't I know you?" he asks.

She doesn't say anything. It doesn't surprise her at all when he snaps her up by the forearm, pulls her down and out of the shuttle.

And she doesn't realize until then, until just before the door shuts on the back of the shuttle behind them, when she hears the pained and groggy voice calling, "Nina?..."

Jill was sitting right next to her.

.

.

.

.

He pulls her quick into some empty cabin house, and she stands still where he stops her next to where something like potato chips have spilled onto the floor, a shabby table knocked over next to her feet.

He looks her over again, this time putting his hands in his back pockets, shifting and pacing back and forth in front of her. She just stands tall and feels her teeth chattering, not knowing anymore if her jaw keeps shaking from fear or anger, but she never once fails to meet his eye now.

"You're Uhura," he finally says, and a chip crunches under his boot as he pauses in his steps. He nods to himself when she refuses to say anything back, slowly says, "My name's Marcon, but I don't think you'd remember. You had a thing with my roommate while we were in training. Ring any bells?"

While she's looking at his face, she does try to remember why he looks familiar; not him but another man, possibly someone she had a class with. Maybe one of that Simone Gourney's friends. As she's looking back intently, he slowly smirks.

"Of course, maybe you don't recognize me with just the one eye." He points with a humored shrug at the patch, which has a long scar running under and past it down from the socket. Nyota's thoughts stray and bristle over some indent on her mind of a Halloween party in the old rec room, Pavel grinning and fumbling to adjust the pirate patch Sulu had on upside down; she feels some weakness kick sharply into her gut, nostalgia frozen over by some feel of distant finality, and tries to gulp it down.

Marcon steps a little bit closer, and now speaks more quietly. "You're in trouble, you know. The whole fleet's been wondering what happened to you, if you and the others are really dead...They're here, aren't they? I bet you could tell me...exactly where they are." Some appetite has him licking at his bottom lip, looking up and down her with a self-satisfied raw look in his eyes. Suddenly he says, "You must have a comm unit somewhere on you...Take off your boots."

She only dares enough defiance to hesitate before stiffly bending down, removing one boot and then the other. The comm visibly tumbles out when her left boot comes off, and for some reason the feel of her bare feet, the loss of that trusty weight against her ankles makes her nerves grip onto what's really happening, how helpless she is and how helpless all four of them are with this man aware that they're here, and she doesn't have so much as...

He's bending over and quickly picking up the comm unit when she speaks.

"I'm going to put my shoes back on, if you don't mind."

The mild cold of her voice makes him laugh, low and slow and lazy. He steps back as if surmising something else about her, looking her up and down again. Anxiously ticking his phaser back and forth in his grasp, he scrunches his nose and drawls, "I suppose that would be fine."

There's a crash outside, two people rustling violently and some shouts heard farther off, the lingering murmurs of warfare still clanging and neither of them flinching at the noise as she's tightening the laces up again. The street lights flicker out for a long cough, then kick back on dimmer than before. Marcon keeps talking.

"Honestly, it's all pretty damn astonishing. You didn't seem like the type, and—well, it's as if everything they used to say about Kirk isn't even true. I wonder," he pronounces mock-wistfully, "what they're going to do to you. You got that little 'X' on your neck, but they're not gonna make you a slave...You're not just libs. You're traitors. After they_nibble _you out of my hands and slap me with half a dozen commendation rewards, they're going to make examples of you." He grins, shaking his head in a kind of bemused horror. "You'll be screaming, Uhura, before they're done with you."

Then something lunges out, somebody crashing out from hiding in the little side room. Nyota gasps at the sight of the Romulan child and Marcon barely has a chance to react before some practiced hard clutch on the bottom side of his hand makes him grunt in pain and drop his phaser. The kid has the weapon and is escaping out the front door as the lieutenant hollers in rage—

And she runs. Her shoes hit sharply against the wood and she's slamming out the back door with absolutely no thought but fucking _run_, adrenaline making the second or two feel like a slow churn of motion before the hears him cursing and cursing and yes coming after her...

Her feet slide against the mud produced by something spilled into the dirt paths, her desperate breath turning into a couple whimpers as she shifts, balances, catches into harder ground and takes to a faster speed; finally after she's able to twist her route into a b-line across the unoccupied back road she gets into a fluid continuous motion—Runs, runs runs and ignores the filthy words being poured after her and the stronger set of feet gnawing behind. Quickly, her mind flits to remember where his vessel was, knows that the second she makes it easier to get back there, it's over.

It's with a swift grinding halt-turn that she cuts a left out of the town, headed toward the woods; he follows.

In a shaking voice she growls a low mutter of something like, "Come on, you son of a bitch," and he has to be thinking there's no way this thin little thing could outrun him, no way at all. And she's suddenly telling herself over and over again that she can't go too fast, not yet, not yet, too fast and he'll stop the chase.

After some uncountable amount of seconds, she feels a twist in her stomach with the sense that he's gaining on her too much, and then a signal seems to turn up in her mind like an air horn. She wills the bolting action of her muscles, a kind of snap propelling her forward at a slicing speed.

Along with the fearful tears streaming cold down her cheeks she is flooding with the awareness of it, that she can and will do this. At this moment she can't think about being anything except fast, but she's pulling not farther but closer to that history of herself as she remembers the one time, she was stupidly late for her philosophy and catching looks as she bolted across the green campus, eventually profusely embarrassed at sideswiping an instructor who she stopped into to say she was sorry, saw arched eyebrows with two possible reactions to her indecisively fumbling against each other in his eyes and how it wasn't until that moment that she'd ever felt any pull into his presence by anything other than respect; she thinks of the finish-line scraping under her teenage feet and a kiss on the forehead from her father when they ate ice cream later but she does not think of these things because they are gone. Because she would only think of these things if she was about to die.

These days there is a wail of worry that they all know, a constant nausea that almost gives the hunger a run for its money, and there is never anything for it except that now she is tearing through the air, her tank top and jacket gnawing themselves in the breeze and with every crunching assault the uneven ground makes to her feet she is destroying all the demons and keeping them off; she loves Jim with his eyes that now look always angry and robbed and Leonard with his calloused way of softening everyone else and Scotty always laughing something off in the back of the house and now even Jill who hates her for something she's never been, and she cannot translate or conjugate or talk her way out of this but hell if she can run fast enough it will be these bastards that don't belong here, not them. Everyone is coming home tonight. This one behind her is a dead man.

Just past the tree she remembers with the crooked corner next to the torn-off branches from a lightning strike, she begins to sprint more clumsy and flailing as she hears him gaining on her again. Plays a game with herself that it's supposed to hurt, faster, harder, faster. She sees in a burning vision the white paint forming a vague 'X' bleeding across the next tree trunk—running just behind it and there's the edge and she _kicks_—

The ground disappears.

Her momentum throws her into slow fall, treading air until she feels the wall of dirt just barely in reach through the unlacing vision of the hologram and scrabbles at it. The air is punched out of her by her impact with the loosening edge and she grips on but feels the cheap mesh collapsing under her; behind and under her is the grunt before a body hits, resounding a consonant crack of bone from the deep fathoms.

There is a quiet stillness, any hum of dying violence back at the Knot drowned out by the night's cold and calm chirping. And as she lets out angry wincing groans at the mesh digging sharply into her hands, as she slowly manages to pull herself up and out and over, as she rolls over to solid ground and sinks back on her elbows, it seems to her that the loudest thing for miles is the sound of her breathing. And breathing. And breathing.


	5. Interlude: Visiting Hours

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interlude

**visiting hours**

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2 WEEKS AGO.

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She was pushing a long stick of gum into her mouth, sitting up so straight at the little round table outside next to the courtyard when he came; he had his hands grasped pertly behind his back, but the other features were comparatively tired, full of holes in the composure even as his face was set with a calm determination. He stalled for a second as if waiting for her to say the first word and then sat down.

Not soon volunteering to speak to him, her face was set in the direction of the next table with a crooked playfulness crowing out under her frazzled unkempt bangs. "What are you lookin' at? Huh, sugar?"

The elderly woman at the table next to her looked back to her crossword, and she smirked.

(Uhura was in the back of the car, head rested back much like Scotty's in the driver's seat as they waited outside a family's home at the domestic sprawl on the opposite end of the little town from their house. Scotty had a sleepless color around his eyes; hers were vaguely worrisome and directed far outside the window. This was, with no regard for all the fabric, less than 300 kilometers away, which was the closest Spock had been to any four of the lost crewmembers since their departure from the_Enterprise_.

Dimensionally, the distance was the same as ever.)

She sat up a little to weave her fingers over each other on the table. "Alright, Captain, I guess I have to bite. What little fuss with little old me brings you planetside?"

"I have been attending several errands on Terra; you are hardly as pressing a spectacle," Spock assured her.

She knew it was partly a lie.

He finally explained, "I came here to offer you a promise of passage back to your home dimension in the instance that the project is a success, but I only offer it on the condition that I feel you are ready to function, morally and socially, in this or any society. This is moderately pressing as I currently doubt that I can, in fact, offer you that opportunity in good conscience."

The look he received was a long, detached observation and confirmation of something in him, until she decided to stand up. "Oh my fucking lord. We might as well go for a walk."

"I would really rather not," he said back in a sigh, but she was already taking off for the courtyard, and with a stiff humility he pursued her down the decoratively paved walkway.

(When Doctor McCoy came out of the house, he quickly came down the rocky driveway, opened the passenger door and opted for dumping his medical case down in the front, an action which made Scotty jump. He got into the back seat, immediately asking Nyota, "Anything?"

"No." She shook her head. "I'm wondering if he even has his comm on him."

"So—" McCoy spoke with the agitation of resuming a previously rushed topic. "Does anybody know why he'd be upset today? I know he's shitty with milestones..."

"Oh, that's right." Scotty remembered, "He pulled a hell of a disappearing act on his mom's birthday..."

"But what's today?" After asking, it only took a close look at Nyota for Leonard to realize what it probably was.)

As he got up to pace alongside her, she didn't turn her glance on him, just started talking again. "What influence do you even have? I may be shoved up in here all day but I can still pick up a news report every once in a while. I guess maybe you haven't been paying attention? But you've become a little bit of a joke. You went from a good year of being the sharpest XO in Starfleet to a captain that's falling right off the rails. Yeah, can I get some ice water?"

Spock's narrow eyes moved briefly to follow the Bajoran volunteer who went off to oblige her as if patiently accustomed to the rudeness. "I am mentally sound."

"Yeah, okay. What the hell makes you think I'd want to go back there, anyway? You put your mission on another hold and come all the way back to the neighborhood, just to offer me a ride. I bet you thought you might be able to enlist my help too, if I said yes."

("Just go drive back around the west end again," McCoy suggested, and Scotty complied as the doctor reached to briefly squeeze Uhura's hand.

She looked over to give a kind of reassuring sad smile, having been staring out the window for another long spell.)

"We require all the aid we can possibly enlist," he granted. "But our progress has reached a certain plateau that requires what Chekov continuously calls 'a century's epiphany' to make our next development."

"Which is a really fancy way of saying you have no idea what you are doing." Her tone shifted to one of basic scientific interest for a moment. "What are you even looking at?"

"Currently Chekov is theorizing a type of dimensional explosive, utilizing a theoretical compound we have yet to perfect."

"…Even if you somehow figure it out, how do you plan on making that a safe trip?...Shit," she muttered when he didn't have an answer. "You're all completely insane."

(Jim had woken with a start in the middle of the night, and she was regretting then believing that he'd want her to pretend not to notice. She'd lain motionless and fallen back asleep trying to gauge if she should say anything, at that point realizing what day it was with a looming sting; when she'd woken up again later, he'd been nowhere to be found. He wasn't supposed to work today.

She'd thought about what happened in Pemba all morning. She didn't know why.)

Her arms were waved out for balance at her sides as she stepped up to creep childishly on the brick border of one of the botanical trees.

(She didn't know why every time he ignored the comm calls she remembered, didn't know why she thought about it now, as if it was sharper than the mourning over the other man. The pains only seemed to escalate each other, the Why Here and Where Is Jim, where is he, why did he. She thought of nightmares, thought of the haunting sound of the beach outside the window ringing through her veins when after one release the disfigured had become so pronounced, at least for her. That mouth both frantic and reverent kissing the insides of her knees and then brushing its way up her thighs, so strangely knowing an action for one that also nearly meant "Stop me," and when she hadn't making her body snap in gasping like a fish out of water. This had happened.)

"Miss Uhura," he said, suddenly impatient and tangential. "I would like you to know that if you are withholding any possible attempt at rehabilitating and improving yourself simply to make a point..."

She tripped on the side of one brick; as she tumbled down clumsy off the side, his hand snatched her arm to soften the landing, but then quickly withdrew as if burned, his expression slightly dazed. As if she was suppressing laughter, her eyebrow rose before she slowly prompted, "Yes, Mr. Spock?"

Spock shook his head, a shadow that was lethal and raw climbing into his eyes. "You need not continue with such concerns, as it no longer makes any difference to me."

"Aww, you think I'm just being too petulant to admit that I wanna help you...Cause _all_anybody wants is to go home."

"No," he quipped, not even caring to explain himself.

"Vulcans," she scoffed, shaking her head as she sat down on the brick and tapped her feet idly on the pavement. "Such a great idea in theory, but give them something to bleed about and they turn into fucking simpletons."

"Goodbye, Uhura."

He was already walking away when she let out a sigh, watched him go for another couple seconds before she boredly blurted out, "I know where Montgomery Scott is."

Spock was paused for the moment as the assistant with the glass of water came by him, cheerlessly handing it to Uhura who handled it atop her knee, waiting for the Vulcan to inevitably turn and come striding back.

When he did he simply asked, "You believe that Mr. Scott could help us?..."

"No, look. Fuck no." She laughed now, incredulously. "Here's what _I_ think: I think that you are going to spend, the rest of your miserable life, frying your brain up trying to wrap it around this conundrum until you end up crawling up your own ass thinking, 'Maybe the solution's in there!' But, I think that _you_think Scott can help you, and that's all that matters to me, because I want you to get me relocated to Doctor Stadley's institution."

Spock blinked. "...And why?"

With a sing-song matter-of-factness, she replied, "Maybe I don't like the weather here."

"You know that given your uncooperative behavior that is strewn all over your records, it would be very foolish of me to assume that you have innocent motives for wanting to be relocated anywhere."

"As if you're really looking at the records anyway," she spat.

"You will not accuse me of being unjust with your situation. You and your former colleagues were offered a gracious level of amnesty on the basis that you remained cooperative. Murdering a member of my crew in the process of a violent escape plan was not particularly cooperative."

She looked at him, considering. "But I don't think you actually care about what I'm capable of nearly as much as you care about getting them back."

"What I want," he slowly replied, "is not relevant."

"The hell it isn't. And when did you ever attempt to really evaluate me, Spock?" She stood up then, taking a couple steps up to him, one of which he expired with a step back. "You want an educated opinion on Nyota Uhura, the ISS edition? On why I am more than content to sit around with these losers with half my intelligence instead of get busted out of here so I can go frolic with the good-natureds? Or, go back to my own_ dimension_ so I can see my pathetic mother again. That's all I'm going to be able to do, considering your friends have probably made things a _little_complicated. That is if they're somehow even alive."

He suddenly gave her a more blazing look: _Get to the point_.

"My mother spent years sending messages to the Empire's headquarters trying to get in touch with me so that they could laugh at the idea that I would want to just skip back home and so that_ I _could laugh at the notion that I would be able to. You have no idea how much of a punchline it is for you to expect me to eat this opportunity out of your hands, and even work for it. What I want, Captain Spock, is to bask in the sunlight and download books by dead people and live my little derelict life without anybody expecting me to talk to another soul because I'm just that crazy bitch who reads too much Ovid. The only problem is it rains too fucking much here."

"Where is Montgomery Scott?"

Her lips were pressed together before she finally said, "He's been in Prague recently."

"This is all you know."

"I got this postcard—Tell me you know what a postcard is, hardly anybody sends them anymore. Lovely bridge over a river on one side, no message on the other side of course, but I know it was from him. He'd do that. Send me a blank card of something just to gloat about being able to go wherever he wants."

Spock went somewhere else in his head, ignoring her until she spoke again.

"A bit of a thought before you go...I wasn't the one who murdered a member of your crew. And I think you have a pretty good idea who it was." Her eyes slanted up to him. "By the way, I definitely don't know where _he_is."

"You believe that he is alive?"

"Don't you?"

"I believe he caused the explosion." Spock nodded. "I have no doubt under that assumption that he would have made sure he survived it."

("What about them?" Leonard darkly muttered when the car idled along next to a shop where a couple League members were loitering. Coming out of the shop was Tom.

Uhura hadn't and wouldn't ask about Scotty's status with Jill, who after her threatening outburst had slipped unceremoniously out of their lives, but she did ask, "Do you think she told him?"

"I know she did," Scotty said, following the glances of the others out across the little street to the deliberating group of Romulans. "I don't think she'd tell anyone else, but he's got to know..."

And it seemed evident in the way the League leader had certainly taken note of the car and noticed them all looking out at him, and responded by looking at them not quite with disdain but with a far more wary than friendly look.)

Spock took leave of Uhura, who strayed farther into the courtyard by herself. At the front, he spoke to the head supervisor who asked him, "Any input this time?"

Spock paused in his steps, coldly considering. He looked behind him to where her figure was indifferent to the wind blowing aggressively at her haphazard ponytail, looked back at the supervisor and said, "Keep her where she is."

(Their conversing about whether they should go anywhere else was interrupted by the small shock of a knocking at the driver's window. They looked out to see Tom looking somewhere over their hood out at the horizon, nonchalantly awaiting the lowering of the car window and then leaning his hands in when the glass was down. "Is there a problem?" he asked.

Scotty stammered a bit. Uhura finally leaned in to ask, "Have you seen Jim around? He's been gone all day."

Tom backed up just a step to lower his glance at all of them, considering. His expression finally settled into some slight compassion. "Do you want me to—?"

"We don't need you to go looking, exactly." Leonard sighed. "But could you just let us know if you see him?"

Another wary hesitation, but he nodded. "Yeah. I'll tell my guys to keep an eye out...Is everything okay?"

There was something about the way he asked that made it suddenly more vividly likely that Jill had told him everything. Like he had to know why they would be really worried. But nobody was going to mention Jill here.

"I'm sure he'll show up back home later," Nyota said with a rather forced shrug.)

A block away from the institution, Spock sat down on a bench after getting a drink of water. For an undefinable reason, he pensively sat there for a minute, as if nursing some inner reeling.

(Tom was already walking away; after a moment he turned back once with some tangled and distracted look, but then he second-guessed and stepped away from the car for good.

Nyota was trying Jim's comm one last time as Scotty pulled them off. She tensed in a guarded way along with McCoy, neither of them exerting quite enough to hope. After it was clear he wasn't going to respond, she flipped the comm unit shut and placed it into her bag, looking back out the window with her fingers tapping idle and anxious at her mouth.)

Spock was just standing up again when his travel comm unit made a chirp, providing no identification of the communication's source. He answered.

"Yes?"

A voice said, "Happy birthday, Spock."

His body hardly jolted with stiff shock, his eyes widened only fractionally, but at the park just across the square there was a hubbub of birds laughing skyward and he looked about, as if he felt watched. Spock spoke icily.

"You have thirty seconds to convince me not to end this transmission."


	6. Gimme Shelter

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chapter 5

**gimme shelter**

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She's blinking away her exhaustion after she finds where Marcon dumped her communicator in the empty cabin. She just squeezes it in her grasp for a second and starts to move back into the eerily quieting outdoors, avoiding the bodies both human and Romulan dumped limp through the streets.

She's just opening her comm unit with her breath held hopefully, when a passing vehicle going fast in hover mode halts all in a millisecond, and she looks and sees it careening closer to the ground and getting out of the driver door is Leonard and she shouts something wordless and runs into his arms.

"What's wrong with him?" she asks, already having seen Scotty in the passenger side with a rushed job of a bandage around his head.

"He caught some shrapnel right after he lost you. The kid took off...I think he's still looking for—"

"Get back in the car," she interrupts as the urgency seizes her again.

She explains while she's hopping into the back and squeezing Scotty's shoulder; Leonard takes off, giving the car its share of scrapes and bumps wrapping it around corners on the way back to where she'd left the shuttle. They're almost there when she suddenly snaps, "Back up, this way, go, go, go I think I saw it—!"

She's almost tossed to the other side of the back seat as he maneuvers them around; he snaps the car back in the direction where she saw the shuttle moving through the cracks between houses on the other end, and in a jolt of precision they're right next to it in the place where the two roads merge.

"You got it!" Leonard shouts frantically as she's yelling a stream of instructions, cringing with all the prayers running through her thoughts when the car gets up just a little bit ahead. With the phaser Scotty passed her from the front seat, she wields out of the back seat and aims her best shot and just doesn't stop shooting where he told her to shoot, just before the couple ensigns can notice them, taking out the integrity of where one half of the passenger section is connected to the cargo. It doesn't look like it's hitting them very hard but the shuttle is emitting a loud bending groan, apparently banged up enough that the pilot has to lag it down. Scotty said the problem wouldn't show up on their sensors as anything more than minor debris damage, but that they wouldn't want to travel far without checking on the hull first.

They're outnumbered by the number of phasers on the two fleet soldiers, but in their aggressive haste, it's easy: A phaser burst to the first one that comes tumbling out of the shuttle and the other one Leonard takes down with a sharp bump of their hood that bowls him into the grass, making it easy to shoot him before he can even feel the ribs he just broke.

"_Hey_—I told you not to move," Leonard's scolding, but is ignored by Scotty flinging the car door open and with a sigh from the doctor they're all moving out of it at once.

At the back of the cargo compartment they can hear a couple shouts, a fist pounding, before they phase the door open and the noises exalt and raise into disbelief; the Romulans who don't have their hands bound are moving to help the others, and Leonard gets up there with the tricorder. Nyota backs up a little when she sees Gene, his hands bound behind his back but not waiting to be helped out of the crude cuffs before he hops down out of the vessel, wearing what looks like pajamas and looking dazed under a gruesome cut just at his hairline.

There's a thunking rhythm of rapidly approaching footsteps that her ears pick up on just as Gene's squinting off, his voice small and laced with numbness and disbelief. "Alel?..."

Gene's back thuds hard against the side of the shuttle when the young Romulan flings himself around him, but Gene doesn't seem to feel it as Alel is practically climbing up his body and burying himself in him, can't hold him up with his hands bound and just leans far down with him into a collapsing ascent until they're both on their knees and Gene is muffling the cry of some sudden onslaught of grief with a bite at Alel's shoulder, pressed close into him. Nyota can only hesitate at the sight of almost violent agony, that pure Romulan rage in a much more pitiful light than she's ever witnessed before, but finally leans down and quietly says Gene's name until he lets her use the fleet phaser to remove his cuffs.

"Leonard, she isn't waking up!" Scotty's voice from up in the shuttle, a bit frantic. Nyota goes over to see Leonard checking her over. This is when she sickly notices how battered-up Jill is; she's seen worse within the last hour, but the green splotches of bruises all over her body are still worrisome.

She runs to get the car and pulls it up right next to the shuttle, getting out again as Leonard's saying, "No, no, that elbow's dislocated, I'll—You shouldn't be carrying her anyway, seeing as you're _injured_—"

Leonard ends up gently placing the unconscious Jill in the back seat where Nyota gently has her legs propped over where she's sitting, and then he and Scotty get back into the front and they're off in a blow of dust. Nyota isn't used to the unsteady handling of the car in hover mode and unconsciously gives almost soothing squeezes to Jill's knee as the vehicle bustles out of the Knot; up front, she hears Scotty having to shoot a couple people, but with the riots slowing it's chillingly about as easy getting out as it was coming in. She vaguely begins to wonder, when they pass a small throng of armed Romulans with a few humans held at gunpoint, if there was actually a winner in this battle.

Once they're on the main streets beyond the dilapidated front gates, she leans forward a little, letting her forehead rest on the back of the front seat, trying to fight the mix of emotional and physical swerving nausea running through her. "Jim?..."

She looks up to see Leonard's eyes in the rear view; he says with reservation, "Still hasn't shown up."

She almost makes it. They get home and pull in the driveway and Leonard carries Jill up the steps and shouts at an injured stranger lingering by the door to be quick about getting inside and in line, then has to threaten Scotty with various creatively unpleasant notions to get him to sit down for an examination and grab the time while Jill is still out to start looking him over. He's just telling him to sit tight and _try_to relax when Nyota's entire body is suddenly lurching her through the door to the side bathroom and she's loudly throwing up.

She kicks the door closed after, washes her mouth out and washes water over her face, squinting into her hands for a minute before she reaches in a deft motion to grab the towel and wipe off. She straightens up and looks at herself in the mirror, and then she pulls the hair off the right side of her neck and looks at it.

The burn mark is crookedly placed, somersaulted between an 'X' and a cross. One stem crawls very visibly over the carotid bump; she shifts the angle of her head a few times, gauging that she'd need another mirror to see it fully where it ends somewhere under her ear. But she can confirm the obvious: It's visible enough to be a problem, to be dangerous for her and for everyone else, and for good.

The door opens just a tad, then all the way, and Leonard steps in and closes it behind them. For some reason that's when she's overwhelmed to the point of collapsing down until her elbows are propped around her head on the sink and her legs are kicking into this angry itchy motion; the first thing her mind picks out of the dirt to land into a sudden groan is "I love him." She's pulled over just a bit and hugs into his torso, gripping his shirt. "I love him so much, I swear if—"

"I know, I know. I love him too, just..." She feels him tousling at the back of her hair while he's talking, and then he's putting down the seat on the toilet so she'll sit down, pulling out his tricorder to look at the brand with a tensed look.

It doesn't take him long to confirm what they both know, and it seems to pain him to say it more than she thinks it all really deserves. "I can't do anything about it. It's a phaser burn that's made to fuck with your natural pigmentation...It'll heal back like that if I do anything to it."

Looking down at his leaning form, she nods, and he lands his hand on her knee.

"How many motherfuckers does that hurt like?"

She gives a sniffling little weak laugh. "A lot."

"So, I want you to go hold some ice on that. And I want you to go outside and wait for him. Okay?"

She takes in and lets out a long breath, and then nods.

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When Jim comes home, the light's off on their porch and he has a senseless thought at first that the figure on the steps is Jill sitting out for a cigarette. Then he remembers that Jill doesn't come over anymore and Jill could maybe be dead, and the body crouched there is unmoving as if poised in an awe that surveyed him all the way from the end of the block. He hesitates in confusion, and then he reaches and flicks on the lantern.

The deep scrapes running up Nyota's legs have a more immediate color than her dirtied cut-off shorts, and his heart leaps at the wrecked sight. She's looking up at him like she can't believe her eyes, a resonant mirror of his own shock: His chest looms up and down in sick worry. Part of him already knows.

"What happened?"

"Scotty's hurt," she explains the important part first. "So's Jill. She's inside...They should both be fine."

He realizes at dreading length, "You went into the Knot?" His voice feels too flat, like he's forgotten how to use it. There isn't enough air in his lungs.

There is a long pause before she evenly demands, "Where were you?"

He opens his mouth but falters back, because it feels so irrelevant right now. "It's too long a story."

The messy abstraction of her features starts to blot recognizably into anger. "Where were you?"

"Tell me what—"

"_No_." In a quick movement, she's off the steps on legs that waver a bit as if weak with exertion. Standing closer and almost fuming. "All this stuff happening, and you come waltzing in late like it's just another day for you to fuck off somewhere without a comm? Tell me what you were doing."

"The bar has a basement under a trapdoor. It was safe down there. I was trying to talk her into waving some other people down..." He gives an overwhelmed shrugging motion. "That's all."

He doesn't like the way she's looking very closely at him, not even blinking for a span of several seconds. "You and the other workers?..."

"...What?"

Now she stands even closer to him. "The entire town was being torn apart, and you were hiding in a basement with your boss."

"Why?" He sneers, the reaction sour. "Feeling disappointed in me?"

"That's not the point." She shakes her head. Abruptly she asks, "Does she suspect us?"

"What?"

"Because if she suspected you, or recognized you, or..." Nyota shakes her head. "God, she could make you do _anything_, and I know that you'd do it, and the worst part, is that you'd never say anything about it because you don't tell us anything anymore—"

"That's not going on," Jim interrupts once he can croak the words together.

Nyota looks like she could cry. "And you're standing right there and telling me, and I don't even know. I don't know if I believe you. We don't know what's going on with you half the time, you're still not eating enough, you're working too much..."

A thick scoff and he's saying, "We need as much as we—"

"_You disappear for entire days_," she snaps. "You think you can take care of everybody, but you can't, and I'm trying to work around this same old bullshit ego of yours so that I can take care of _you_."

"Yeah, well, it's hard..." Jim says vaguely, "when it comes to you, I mean."

"What are you talking about?"

"I was never supposed to be anything except _Captain_to you," he bites out, not really wanting to say it, his hands making a helpless motion. "You didn't sign up for this."

"None of us signed up for this," she immediately protests, but it's not that it isn't clipping onto the right meaning for her, and her eyes get a little sad. "Don't do that. Not right now."

He looks right at her for a pause, implacable.

"Jim..." Nyota looks a little stunned. For a while neither of them speaks while her head shakes in protest and she starts to say something, and the interruption comes out like he needs to rob the words from her.

"Sure, you love me, in some..." He makes a searching gesture in the air as his voice gets more animated with a grind of near-anger. "In a kind of claustrophobic way, you love me, yeah."

She opens her mouth again—

"I mean, wake _up_," he almost shouts. "You barely even_ liked _me when we were back home."

She steps back from him, and he can practically feel her whole body thrumming with anger, doesn't understand it but is already starting to wish he could take it all back.

"You don't know what happened to me today," is all she can think to say before she turns away.

He sees it then; every sound in his mind goes rumbling and dissonant as he's stepping forward. "Wait..."

When he reaches to lift her hair up to look at her neck, her hand slaps down his arm.

"Did—" He can't even speak, suddenly choking hard on rage, "Did somebody—?"

"Yes." Her arms clutch at herself and she shakes her head.

"Somebody—God, somebody hurt you, I'll fucking—"

"—Nothing else happened," she tries to harshly cut through his panic, and by now he has no idea what he's saying or what his hands are trying to grasp at, the air, her, the neck of some sick bastard or the big blow of a solid fact screaming in his mind that means _I need to get them the fuck out of here..._

Everything halts and fizzles out when she slaps him hard across the face. He lets out one pant and backs up a step, a hand scrubbing at the back of his neck.

Her chest heaves up and down angrily. She starts, "I—" And then instead of saying anything she throws her arms around him.

Jim is barely realizing the change of the weather enough to tighten back his hold around her when McCoy blows out onto the porch in the squeek of the screen door, looking with a sharp intake of breath at Jim.

"I am_ really _fucking happy you aren't one of the dead bodies on the broadcast, but right now I need both of you to help me in here."

Coming into the kitchen, Jim takes in the crowd of Romulans who are just numerous enough to make the area a bit too crowded to see what's really going on. He doesn't recognize any of them except for Khamak. Just as he's coming in all dazed and hesitant, Scotty's voice is at his left, and he looks down to see him lying on one of the two medical tables. Scotty gives a surprised, "Ey, it's Jimmy" before automatically clutching Jim's hand into a tightly grasping shake, insistent and maudlin.

"You alright?" Jim asks, looking him up and down.

Scotty shakes it off with a motion of his head, face both pained and happy with relief and Jim manages a small smile of reassurance.

"You're supposed to be asleep," Nyota accuses.

"I'm _resting_, sweet hon."

They get sort of interrupted and Jim and Nyota try to inch farther to the other side of the kitchen when it becomes clear there's a bit of an uproar with the Romulans; a couple of them are making inscrutable demands and launching out too many questions and the whole scene is pierced with the undertow of the long suddenly building wail from beyond; as the crowd moves just enough to see through, Jill appears in a vision of terrible sobbing, the squinting rage of grief and agony or both at once spilling from where she clutches the cheap sheets and coils up, all numb of her near-nakedness in the scrub gown hiking up in her motions. And Bones is _pissed_, going with authoritative anger right up to Khamak, when Jim asks, "Who was it?"

Standing next to him, Nyota's expression is almost sickened, and she realizes what he's asking. "Tom."

Jim's mood sinks to the floor, and Leonard's voice is barking atop the mess of mutters: "You come in here and upset my patient—I haven't even set her arm back yet cause you and your punks won't clear off and _don't_give me that shit, you can understand exactly what I'm saying—"

Khamak comes up closer to the doctor to say something that doesn't quite make it across the room.

"She told me she wants you all to leave, she's been sayin' it since you walked in—"

"You_ lie_—"

"Fuck off," Bones says, unusually quick to be so dismissive.

"She is my _eri-ailhun_!" Khamak protests.

Jim sees Nyota's face fall, ever-so-briefly, to a terse acceptance when her mouth forms an 'O,' and Bones even hesitates in confusion, but shortly has his arms widened apart, eyebrows all heaven-help-us.

"I don't care if she's your left kneecap," he snaps. "She doesn't _want_you here. Look, you can keep the hypos these other jackasses are pocketing, just get out before I have to throw you out."

And there's a certain way Bones gets that clears all the noise out of a room; Jim's seen him do it several times during emergencies and now it even works on a group where half of them may not even understand him. In a moment they've all disappeared but the room is still pretty occupied; Bones asks Nyota to talk to the young boy with an injured leg who's been sitting far over in the waiting chair looking like a deer in headlights, drugs up Scotty so that he'll go to sleep, and in a rush of trying to be heard through all of Jill's grief is getting to work on her.

"Look, I can give you an anesthetic, I just don't know—"

"It's fine. I know you shouldn't waste them," Jill speaks in a surprising flatness through the ongoing stream of her crying. "Just do it."

"...Right." Bones nods, and then nods again. He's moving over and arranging his grasp around her arm, and says, "Count of three?..."

Without thinking Jim moves forward and manages just before the final count to offer his arm as something to clutch at, and his hand is seized in hers in an unthinking motion. Her water-streaked face cringes and clutches into him just before the shout of pain seizes sharp through her; right afterward she seems to actually realize it was him who was standing there, just as he drops her hand and is already moving away.

He walks out to where the living room space is visible in the kitchen, with a look of purpose that makes Bones yell after him, "Jim?..."

"I'm counting," he says before getting down to the floor and sliding the box out from under the couch. "Tell me if you have anything to put in."

"I thought you were going to count at the end of the month," Bones says a little tiredly, and turns back into the kitchen to go tend to the child; Nyota slips by him and has a paper bag—one of the ones Scotty stashes his pay in—and is handing it to Jim, sitting down next to him and silently starting to help him sort the bills into piles.

Some five minutes later, she's announcing her total just before he's almost finished counting. His motions slow, put down the last bill with a resigned slap.

"We still need at least a grand," he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. "If we want much of a chance."

He finally sees her frowning over at him. "We'll get it," she says quietly.

He just sighs back on the floor for a tired moment, then sits back up to start putting it all away.

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The next morning the local broadcast is announcing the estimated number of human casualties as well as the number that were captured or killed all over town; it's weird to think that no one thought to ask of it the night before, but if there was a winner and a loser, the Knot triumphed. The one or two torpedoes they'd spent on Imperial attackers had left the soldiers unwilling to call any bluff on whether they had many more of them to shoot; Nyota and Scotty agree that while it was a little hard to discern what was happening while in the thick of it, it seems like most of the fleet members escaped.

Jim is shaking his head in grim wonder at the whole thing still; he understands how it must have happened with the two of them when it looked like only civilians were coming to attack them, then them suddenly being in the crossfires when the fleet showed up. Nyota turns to Scotty when she's sitting playing a very distracted game of cards with him in bed, thinking to ask, "You don't think anyone recognized you, do you?"

"I didn't even get very close to any of them, I don' think," Scotty mumbles. "I didn't even think of that before..."

"One of the men who captured Jill...He knew me, or knew her, before." Her arms are crossed and she just shifts around in response to the eyes growing more amazed at her. They all wait for an explanation and all she offers is, "But it doesn't matter. He's dead."

By noon there's video footage on the pirated local channel, ashen images on screen to match the smell reaching all over the town of piles of burning bodies being disposed of out at the nearest foothill. Jill is on the couch wrapped in a blanket, taking in the news of victory with exhausted, numb features. Jim keeps waiting to see her and Scotty speaking with each other, but maybe he's giving her some space, maybe he's even still a little mad at her. She lets Nyota sit next to her, the two just sitting close with their shoulders touching watching the viewscreen together, but they don't seem to talk.

Gene somehow gets his hands on their comm number; they get a call from him a couple times, the first time to make sure he can take Khamak's word for it she's okay, the second time to see if she wants to talk. Jim detects that there's some confusion about her insistence to stay at the house. McCoy is grateful for the rare calm cooperation of a badly injured patient, but it seems a little unlike her. Jim eventually remarks very quietly that it's probably just going to be very difficult to see how different things look, how different things are, when she goes back home.

"About a quarter of the people she knew at all will have disappeared," he says. "It's gotta be terrible over there."

Brighton comms to inform him that there's no use coming in to work that evening when they need as much help as they can get re-structuring the front gate.

"Wait, which gate?"

"_The_ gate. Forget the Knot, have you _seen_it? The Knot is no more, my friend."

It ends up a very interesting sight when he reports to work there; Romulans were always partly involved in the main border security, but there are dozens of people both alien and human helping to hammer back up all the metal that isn't beyond repair. In certain ways, it's an inspiring sight to see all the integration. There are a couple feuds between a Romulan lady with a bad temper and a young man complaining that he can't understand her; at other times, though, you'd never guess there had been such a broad divide before.

Somebody puts on some music later in the day; it's a very old Terran song and Jim is surprised that some of the Romulans seem to know it, and for a few minutes somebody's very theatrically lip-syncing and somebody else is cat-calling at them and somebody else is rhythmically banging their tools together, people snickering all around. Everything feels a little bit lighter, even when he knows there's something warring under the surface with all these people.

Before he walks home, he overhears all the buzz about the fact that Brighton's taking the bids at the end of the month. He sighs and pushes the constant tick of that thought to the back of his mind.

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Jim stops at the entrance to Bones and Scotty's room, leaning into the doorway for a second before he goes inside. After sighing down comfortably with his feet hanging off next to where Scotty is half-sitting-half-lying at the head of the bed, he comments, "You guys get more sun in here."

"Real bitch when you'd rather sleep all day," Scotty points out.

Jim cracks a slight smile. "How are you doing, man?"

"Oh, you know. Dizzy and hungry."

Jim fiddles with the blanket. "Are you talking to Jill at all?"

Scotty sets down what he's reading to scrub a hand at his forehead. "Has she made you any amends?"

Jim jostles a leg out farther, shakes his head a little. "...She doesn't owe me anything. It's not a nice feeling that she couldn't believe us just because we're us, I get that, but it's not fair to blame her."

"Yeah, it's funny how none of that makes me feel any better about it."

Jim takes in a long breath and lets it go, sits there tapping his finger on something for a second, and then abruptly gets up.

"Good talk," Scotty grunts after him.

Jim rolls his eyes. Only a minute later he's walking out of the kitchen having produced the box of cigarettes Bones found in one of the cabinets a couple days after Jill stopped coming over. She's on the couch still, and instead of saying anything he tosses the little box onto her lap and twiddles between his fingers the oddly crafted lighter she also left as he goes out onto the porch. She's blinking after him, recognizing a crude invitation when she sees it, and shortly after seating himself on the step she comes out after him with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and one of the cylinders hanging from her mouth.

They sit in silence at first as he lights it for her, taking the first whiff when she offers and coughing a little right after. She breaks into half a cackle at him.

"Oh, fuck off," he mumbles, coughing once more. "Those aren't all that popular back home."

Her eyes go flat and sly. "Is that so?"

"Kinda hard to keep up the habit if you regularly live in space, anyway."

It's the beginning of something that is more like a currency of honesty than an exchange of real trust. She falls into contemplation for a minute, and finally mutters, "I put in a lot of research trying to figure out what Scotty was trying to tell me that day, you know."

"And did you get anywhere?"

"I get the general concept. But it's all theoretical anyway."

"Not to us," Jim says, almost with a dark laugh. The expression on her face makes him crook into a half-grimace. "You don't believe us, do you?"

She lets out a long sigh of smoke."I guess what it comes down to is I definitely didn't cover for all of you because I _believed_you. I just...I don't know. Answer me this. Let's assume, for a minute, I believe you...What were the Romulans like where you come from?"

"_That's_ the first thing you ask..." He sits back slowly, wearing an expression that makes her cock her eyebrow at how he's almost cringing. "They were never a picnic when I was in command. A lot of the ones I encountered were paranoid and difficult if not outright murderous. I mean, Nero was Nero, but anyone could have done what he did if they were crazy enough. You can't just ask me to tell you what they were like, as a whole, that's not...It's not really _fair_."

"Would I fit in with them?" she asks a little wryly.

Jim only hesitates a second before shaking his head, quietly admitting, "I doubt it."

He's surprised by the frown and the way she goes quiet for a moment. She puts out her cigarette and then has a lukewarm ironic smile, realizing, "Hey...I believe you."

He shakes his head at the half-joke. "Talking like that, it's like you're not much of a fan either."

"I'm a misanthropist," she corrects. "Well. Who _isn't_, but I do have to admit...there's just something that runs through my race that makes us even worse than Terrans."

He gives her a look of surprise.

"Yeah." She scoffs at herself. "I guess I've never told anyone before that I feel that way. But, you know, _history_. We've been at our own brothers far longer than we've been enslaved by anyone else. Your planet named Romulus very appropriately; if I was superstitious I'd think you condemned us all to fratricide."

He gives an incredulous, cynical little sound.

"Did your Romulans also enslave their own people?"

"We didn't know a whole lot about them. Though, my first officer suspected once..." His voice trails off, and he sort of dismisses his own comment with a shrug.

"Your Spock?" Jill prods, as if curiously drawn to something she hears in Jim's voice.

"But our humans enslaved themselves too," Jim averts, insisting with a bit of anger, "and the other night, that wasn't a Romulan who hurt Nyota, so. I think your theory has some problems."

"All I know is, somewhere I decided that the difference between somebody I'd like to know and everyone else is whether a person can take something awful that's happened to them, something so devastating and disappointing, or disillusioning, and turn it into hope somehow. And Romulans are shit at it. I don't know how it's done, but I've done it. I'm not sure how many more goes I have in me, but at least I got this far...Though, really, you should be thanking your sweet Jesus or whoever that I'm trying to be some kind of example because you might be dead otherwise."

"...What do you mean?"

"What Nina said, when I...you know. It was like she knew the way I felt about that, like she knew I'd have to back off if she made the comparison—"

"I don't—Oh. Right."

Jill takes a second to scrutinize him, looks like she could almost laugh. "You don't know what it means."

"...No."

Her arms go wide out in a gesture of surprise. "And you never asked her?"

"No," he quietly repeats.

Jill puts out the last of her cigarette and slowly sits up a bit straighter. "This phrase: '_Veoth-rhannu, kivoi ekhes._ It's historically important to Romulans, and unless this happened with your world too, I'm guessing she just happened to read about it at some point. Near the end of the many decades when they were still enslaving their own lower classes, families were still respected as units and weren't separated from each other, so it was more of a feudalism structure. But then that went out of fashion, and suddenly anybody could get ransacked and thrown out of their houses, and if their kids didn't look like they'd make strong workers, _well_." She raises her brows ruefully. "The only way you really had a prayer was if you knew you were the last of your name. Family lineage was always important to Romulans, and they would occasionally take pity on families who had no relatives left, and the parents would call out, 'Mercy for my children.' Only in the alternate phrase which became more famous, '_Dosais-rhannu, ekhes_,' it literally meant, 'Mercy for what is of me,' 'Mercy for what is left of me.' That's what she said. And even if I couldn't believe Scotty I at least understood that the four of you are alone."

The impact of that settles for a moment. Jill rearranges her blankets, gives Jim another speculative look.

"What is the deal with the two of you anyway?"

Jim takes a second to react.

"I mean, she's your girl, right?"

He lets out a little surprised noise, slowly shakes his head. "No, she's..."

Jill's just waiting with expectant eyes, and he doesn't know why he'd talk to her of all people about this, but then he's opening his mouth.

"We sleep in the same bed," he explains numbly, giving a slight shrug. "Sometimes she wants me, I guess. It would work better if we were happy. But if we were happy, we wouldn't be here."

"So you two weren't like that...before..."

This is when he realizes he just really wants to fucking _tell _somebody, since he's never quite been able to bring it up to Bones. "I used to make these cracks sometimes...I would make fun of her for being just, a _little_bit nicer to me...when her man wasn't around." He slowly shakes his head. "Talk about a joke that isn't funny anymore."

Jill has a vaguely confused look, but not an unsympathetic one.

"...He was a good friend of mine. Or, he was supposed to be. I really don't know anymore," he cuts out of that nervous rush of words, rubbing at his eye. "So does your boyfriend know about Scotty?"

She wears a not particularly bothered expression, like everything is too cold and bleak right now to bother feeling bad about that, and Jim isn't sure if it makes him more or less irritated. "What about Scotty?...Khamak didn't propose to me until I'd stopped coming over here."

Jim feels his mouth slowly dropping open.

"He and his friends have a pretty good chance of winning Brighton's ship, and they've been making one too many promises to people; I'd have to have a little more than camaraderie with him to get any guarantee that I could come along. He knows why I accepted. It doesn't bother him."

"_That's_ who you were talking about, I thought—your actual _friends_—"

"My _friends_ will also have a way out of here, okay. Don't think for a second I'll be too busy suffering a loveless marriage to be grateful that I got them away from here, it'll hardly matter to me." Her voice is rising a little, and he can hear her more frantic emotion over recent events in the words. "It's not so terrible of him that he wouldn't offer me that if we weren't getting married. Especially since hardly anyone else would want me. Even aside from the preference for more _traditional_women," she explains with a bad taste in her mouth, "it's not like I'm able to have children."

At some point Jim has started pinching the bridge of his nose. "If we get that ship," he slowly says, "you will have a ride off of Earth regardless of whether you want nothing to do with us, and it's sure as fuck not because Scotty _doesn't_care about you—"

"I'm aware of the concept of unconditional love, thank you."

She's so terse, as if she's totally aware of how this whole nightmare they fell into over a year ago must look to him, and it makes him bark into the tiniest laugh, grim and overwhelmed when he explains, "I am just so sick, Jill. I have had it up to my eyes, seeing people just _settle_for what they have because they're stuck where they are."

"Maybe you should try being a bad man then."

He lets out another huff.

She shrugs. "I've never seen anyone who was good to anybody else end up happy."

"I hate," Jim says after some consideration, "that I believe you."

"Only the kind suffer," she says; it sounds proverbial. "And you can't be kind without suffering first."

"Now, that second part..." Jim mutters, shaking his head, "That just isn't true."

"You've suffered, though," she says, like she's thought a little too hard about all this. "I mean, you're the one who almost always seems like you're angry at something."

Jim thinks, taking in a deep breath. Finally saying with an uncomfortable twisting expression, "There's suffering and then there's loss. I don't think...that mine really compares to anything in this place..."

"Does thinking about it that way make it hurt any less?"

"No." He shrugs and says, "But none of it has much to do with the fact that I'm trying to do the right thing."

She looks dubious, like she made up her mind about all of this a lifetime ago. "Suffering is a part of life; the people who avoid it aren't whole. They have no compassion. If I can believe that what I've been through is cathartic, it all at least makes some sense."

"But, hypothetically. What if everybody's born good?"

"Is that what you think?"

"Yeah. Maybe."

Her expression is wry and slowly considering as she stands up, slipping the blanket off her shoulders and setting it on the step.

She sighs. "Then I guess you got me there, Captain."

He looks up at her. "Are you taking off?"

She shrugs, meaning she is. He takes in that she's antsy, as if she needs to run off and just let everything out for a while, but she's also searching for something to say, biting her bottom lip. "I'm sorry about what I did. I'm gonna make it up to you, okay?"

He doesn't know what to say. "You don't have to leave..."

"I really should, you know?...See you later, Jim." After idly fiddling with a zipper on the thin hoodie Nyota lent her, she turns and takes the first couple steps out.

"Jill?"

Scotty's in the doorway, and Jill stops at the sound of her name. She seems to gather something into a ball before turning to give him this sad, indirect smile, slow and flinching.

"You want my jacket for the way home?"

There is a long wind of hesitation before she turns and comes a couple steps back, the tone in her answer making it as if this is some much more serious question at hand. "Yeah. Okay."

When Scotty reaches out and is helping her into the sleeves one after the other, she slides slowly into the bomber coat and Jim realizes somewhere in the middle of the motion that she's crying. Some little gulp of sound escapes her as he's clutching the collar around her, giving her an affectionate last tug.

The words are so quiet when Scotty whispers something to her, but Jim thinks he hears "I'm sorry," and then Tom's name, amidst something else.

Jill sniffs and nods, just mumbling, "Yeah."

Scotty plants a firm, long kiss on her forehead, her entire body stilling with the emotion, her eyes shutting. And then he lets her go.


	7. Easy To Be Hard

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chapter 6

**easy to be hard**

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Jim's favorite regular at Rosetta's is a middle-aged woman who comes in for a hard drink a few times a week and can't seem to remember that he doesn't like to be called James. The first morning after the front gate is up again, she's sitting and deeply forlorn at the bar an hour after Jim comes in.

He approaches her when he has a rest from his tables, pauses at the sight of her idly turning some scrap of paper around in her fingers. "Hey, Molly," he quietly greets.

Some sad smile and a couple small-talk comments later, she says, "Did you and yours stay safe during all the mess?"

There are too many complicated ways he could answer that question. "I lost a...friend of a friend. But I can't say we weren't lucky."

He looks at her for a moment, at how she hasn't looked up at all, and he's about to go refill another drink when she says, "They took my brother."

Rosetta is on the comm at the other end of the bar; she looks over and scrutinizes the sad dismantled woman nursing her gin, and cocks an eyebrow. Jim has stopped moving for the moment, and finally just takes a couple steps back and leans into Molly's space enough to whisper, "I'm sorry."

"Branded him and hauled him off just like he was..." She shakes her head, finally showing tear-streaked eyes. "He'll be sold somewhere. There are not that many people who want to own humans, you know, that's the terrible part. That I know he must be going to the worst."

Jim is about to try to reassure her, tell her her brother could just be put in a factory somewhere, when Rosetta whistles shrilly, prodding him to look over. She's holding a comm in the crook of her neck and indicating that she needs him in the stock room, and with an irritated slap against the bar he walks off to oblige.

Rosetta (Jim thinks there's no way that's her actual name) gives him a couple waves while she's still talking on the comm, gesturing for him to carry a couple wine boxes. In another half-minute she hangs up the comm and taps it in thought against her hand, as if trying to remember something she was going to say.

"Oh, Jim..."

He sighs from a couple feet away and turns to look at her.

She mouths, _Molly?_while she points at the door, mockingly. "Milk that for all it's worth, just make sure she's sober enough to pay the tab."

"...You're a fucking animal, you know that?"

He didn't think before he said it, but he's unyielding, glaring at her when she tersely turns back to him to lean with a hand onto the low wooden table that's between the two of them, eyebrows going high. He gives her a look as if to say it sure as hell isn't _his _turn to say something, almost shrugging back at her. "You better watch it, Cyrus," she boredly scolds.

The thing about Rosetta is that she's one of those people who, in theory, if you take one piece of the package at a time into account, is very attractive.

The other thing about her is that she was making remarks that made him wonder what the hell she was doing out here in Asheville from the day he came in for an interview; the entire make-up of how she treats other people has always appeared so demeaning and belittling and bullying that it took him weeks, maybe months, of being around the ugly feeling she put in his stomach to actually notice that she was irrelevantly so pretty. He spent that entire hellish stretch of hours during the riots pent up with it and the fact that she just sat there content to be safe while he was crawling out of his skin wondering what was going on outside, the fact that he couldn't believe he was with someone like her for the duration of it. It's not that fact or how she's always been or anything that Nyota said to him about her or what she just said, but all these things at once.

"Or what?" Jim takes a few steps around the table.

"You don't think I'll hesitate to throw you off the job? I don't need to remind you I fired Paul just last week."

"You're going to bring up _Paul_? Paul, the one who I walked in on you with right here, the day before he skipped town."

"God, don't get so delicate about everything—"

"You did not _fire_Paul." Jim fervently says, "He had a wife. They were desperate to get off-planet. I can add it up."

But of course he should know that she wouldn't attempt to really deny it; while he's been talking she's gotten out her sixth cigarette of the day and lights it all cool and calm, scrutinizing him mildly.

Something in Jim gets more severe; he's bearing down on her a little now. "How much did you pay him for him to let you fuck him? At least I can know if it was close to worth it," he demands.

That's when just the tips of her mouth hint at the beginning of a wicked smile; that's when she looks him up and down. "How much are you worth?...Is that what you're asking?"

Jim's eyes are gut-driven and cold as he steps into her. He snatches her cigarette and takes one draw from it before he looks right into those abysmal greenish things surrounded by her lashes. "Get on the table," he says.

There she is, eyes cocking in some filthy type of contentment as she backs up the half-step and hoists herself up in a quick movement, and inches farther in, knees high and resting back on her hands in something almost like a coyly inviting pin-up pose.

He laughs at her.

"Oh, wow," he gets out through his cocky sudden mirth. "At least I know I've still got it. You just...fucking hopped right off your feet there like a five-year-old getting on a ferris wheel. Jesus."

He accompanies his laughter with a mocking toss of a motion, and there's an overturning realization of what this is coming into her face. She slowly scoots back to the edge of the table, her jaw clenching visibly.

"The question you should have been asking is: Is there any conceivable thing that I want _that_badly?" He says this while he backs up and points somewhere at her, as if at some idea the table itself represents. "And: Yes. Yes, there is."

He tosses her cigarette into the sink by the door, and then shrugs.

"But it's nothing you can give me." This he says while walking back up to her to lean in right at her ear, and say, "I quit."

He is probably all the way home by the time she realizes that the tip cash from her pockets is gone.

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Bones is leaning into the counter going over some medical inventory and Nyota is sitting reading the PADD press when he saunters into the kitchen with a not-quite-sheepish expression. He's sitting down next to Nyota but she doesn't seem to notice him until Bones does, and moves his work to the table with a perturbed expression. "I thought you went in to work," he says.

Jim nervously does some little rhythmic knocking against the table. He meets Nyota's eyes before he says, "I lost the job."

Her eyes soften at him, and Bones doesn't find it all that strange when she briskly changes the topic by bopping a couple commands into the PADD and then sliding it over to Jim.

"That ad on the bottom right corner?" She takes a sip from her glass, puts it down and declares, "I am going to win that contest."

Jim looks over at her, down on the ad, back to her again, an eyebrow cocking in bemusement.

"You sing?"

She's slowly nodding, slowly grinning.

"You _sing_?"

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It's an actually refreshing challenge for Scotty and Jim to fabricate Nyota an identity with enough non-suspicious specifics in time to get her under the wire of the sign-up deadline for the contest, and by then she has exactly two weeks to prepare. She hasn't done a lot of singing even for fun lately, and seems to spend the first few days of time at the house warming her voice back up. One morning Bones and Jim are both crammed in front of the sink while she sings in the shower, Bones calling out scales and song requests until she starts making up lyrics to what she doesn't know, giving them both fits of snickers while they're trying to brush their teeth.

Jill comes over one day saying, "This is all I could find" and dumping a pile of crimson silk-like fabric in front of Nyota, who only mentioned in passing to her that they needed to somehow come up with a decent gown. Nyota looks at her and the fabric in blinking surprise as she even hands over some suggestions she got from an acquaintance who knows more than most of them about sewing.

They all help with the dress when they're not at work. One evening finds all of them sitting on the floor with plates of snacks and a couple sewing kits watching a miniseries, Nyota telling Scotty, "Give that over to Jim after you pin it. That part's really exposed and I think his stitches are the neatest."

"My stitches are beautiful," Jim hums around the needle clamped in his lips, playful and cocky in the eyes.

"Jim, please try not to swallow any pointed objects," Bones mutters. "And don't hold it in your _teeth_either—"

"So, Jill," Jim interrupts, with a look at Bones that might as well say, _Yes, I am in fact five years old_ but then reverting immediately into something more serious. "Tell me about the revolutions." And Jill does.

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The current state of friction between small abolitionist movements and the larger political powers is the fourth rebellion against Terra by Terrans that has ever been notable enough to make up what is or will become history. Despite the small size of the Knot and the relatively ineffectual protest of the rest of the town, they are part of a quiet phenomenon. Jill knows for a fact that the most well-built anti-slavery area is not here but somewhere in Sweden, and also hears rumors that there is a highly secretive one that's literally underground in Calcutta.

Only forty years before now was a controversially and arguably over-sensationalized trend in New York, where a number of servants used in smaller establishments proved to be effective enough businesspeople that many of them were coerced into more cooperative collaboration by being paid a small sum under the table. This phenomenon escalated quickly into the mostly indifferent public awareness, and while it took years for the authorities to intervene, it had already been wryly nicknamed "Little Ferenginar" for its high population of quietly infuential Ferengi who in some cases started as slaves and became merely poorly paid immigrants lurking in the lowest class. As rebellions go, it was weak and profit-driven, and the Imperial forces mostly came in and shut down many of the businesses on the basis of the anti-imperial pro-independent attitudes of the locals. Business licenses were revoked, and local officials imprisoned. It was one of the first of recent concerns that led to the blacklist as well as much stricter monitoring of slavery in industries.

A long time before then in the 2170s, a small crew in the Imperial fleet allegedly attempted the type of more peaceful economic negotiations not unlike the ones Captain Spock was attempting before his disappearance. It is unknown what eventually happened to this crew; the official explanation is that a group of Vulcans found their ship in a compromised state and took them out while they were defenseless, but it is understood in certain groups that this was quite possibly a misunderstanding that the Empire willingly allowed in order to instill fear towards the concept of cooperative diplomacy, if they did not fabricate the story themselves.

The first ever attempt to vocalize protest against the Terran Empire occurred in the mid-to-late 20th century, when what would become the Empire was first rising from its roots of a small and secretive political party to a constant presence in politics. A prominent counter-culture founded on peaceful protests grew into the sub-cultural basis of many personal rights movements in North America, using expression through artistic means to breed resistance against the monarchy. The head of the government may not have been directly involved in the backlash, but he allowed it, when in a riot much like what happened at the Knot, a music festival was bombarded with armed terrorists who slaughtered over 20,000 civilians. Quiet conspiracy was clearly abandoned; the Empire had installed itself into a position of threatening influence and was content to prevail by maintaining terror.

However, the eventual contact with alien forces eventually allowed Terra to return to a state of relative hegemony, once hostility towards these new outsiders gradually supplanted domestic racism and sexism. Xenophobia took on an increasingly abstract form of fear that allowed the now technologically apt Imperial Starfleet to be hailed or at least respected as an important defense; this attitude was used for the Empire's gain in allying directly with the Fleet in order to exploit other species, reap the benefits of space colonization, and gain enough economic success to provide for the Terran population and inspire the utmost pride in Earth that would put tremendous uninterrupted power in the officials' hands.

This shifting paradigm of the people's ideas is of course, Jim can imagine, not directly implied in any history records; but Jill tells it this way like it's completely obvious.

"They still love the music, though."

"Hmm?" Nyota is looking up from reading something at Jim's last remark to Jill.

"Haven't you noticed a lot of the music they play here is really, really old? A lot of it's from that era; I've noticed that twentieth century music is pretty popular, and probably a lot of it was part of the political movements."

"Oh, yeah." Nyota shrugs. "It's not surprising that they'd be into any and all music from Earth. It's not like back home when you'd walk into a restaurant and hear pop music from other planets every once in a while. This club I'm singing at, their whole theme is like a...glammy rock and roll revival."

"Do you know what song you're doing?" Jill asks her.

"Yes." Nyota says it with a little grin, keeping it to herself for whatever reason.

This is the day they're finishing up on the most important part of the dress. Jill keeps wrapping the stiff fabric around the sides and back of Nyota's neck to make sure it covers up the brand, and there's been much idle debate over whether the high collar is going to look terribly matronly, but they don't have much of a choice.

Jim goes into his work shift and comes home later, and hasn't realized that the dress is done as quickly as he realizes some more vague noise of exclamation in the front of his mind.

She's muttering as she looks into their only mirror. "They're gonna know the minute I walk in that something's off about me, I look so...hungry and—"

"Ah, none of that, now," Scotty's protesting. "You look fucking marvelous."

Jim takes back any concerns he shared that the gown might end up looking too stately. It's gorgeous. Even with the simple work on the skirt, the fabric is so rich and resonant it speaks for itself against her skin; the sleeveless boasting of her beautiful shoulders leading into the narrow style of the high collar gives her a regal sophistication. The uniqueness of it is bold rather than anywhere close to ridiculous. It should go without saying considering she's going to be getting up on a stage, but really, she has no hope of not being very, very noticed.

Nyota sees him in the doorway. She furrows her brow. "Are you coming in or out?"

"—Oh." Jim swallows and steps inside. She looks a little perplexed by him and is looking back into the mirror, when Bones cocks an eyebrow at Jim, looking like he's suppressing a laugh.

The actual stress over the real danger of what they're doing finally kicks in the night that they're heading to the front gate for their one-time-out. That League member Charlie is working the security and looks extremely curious about what they're doing. She tries to convince them in slightly broken Standard that it's too risky to go messing around when there could be some slavers skulking around the boundary, probably confused by Nyota already wearing the gown in the passenger seat. But she waves them through in the end, not acquainted enough with them to really make it her business.

"Bones."

Jim is in the back seat resting his temple against one of his hands while Bones drives the three of them; the plan is for him to drop them off and pick them up later because while they really couldn't let Nyota go alone it seemed like a really bad idea to all show up to the party. Bones is acting as jittery as Jim feels, slamming his thumb against the wheel in an irregular rhythm. Jim repeats his name in mild irritation.

"Sorry," Bones says, moving his hands lower on the wheel.

Thankfully contestants were scheduled in the order in which they registered, meaning that Nyota's up second to last and they're able to get there fashionably late. Bones drops them off a few blocks away after they decide the vehicle is considerably far from upper-crust style, and Jim finds it kind of reassuring as he and Nyota walk up to the club that they're both a little good at slipping in anywhere like they own the place. He's already given Bones the reassuring lecture about how nobody's going to think anything other than "Funny how she looks like..." He has to admit it's only now he's gotten to really convincing himself of it.

The club is called Edie's and is about what Jim expected, only bigger, everything a sort of glamorous expensive version of your average night life without the seedy low lighting and a lot more space for shimmying, not that anyone looks like they're one to shimmy. There are some round tables that seem mostly filled up, with half of the crowd only standing around. Jim and Nyota have already decided to split up, make it look for the most part like they're both there alone. She heads up to the front and is talking to some man, maybe the pianist or somebody like that, while Jim finds a place to sit at the bar in the far back.

There are Orion servants working the place. It's pretty atypical to see them around, as Jim understands they were introduced into Terran slavery around Tokyo. He thinks, dryly, that the owner must have thought they'd match the drapes.

A group is on stage singing "Long Cool Woman" when Nyota is across the room chatting up some guy just to look busy; he offers her the seat next to him, and something stirs in Jim at noticing the girl the same time she does: There's a child who's small enough to have to strain to reach the glass on the table, carrying a pitcher in a clearly tired shaking grasp. She refills the glass and puts it back before Nyota composes herself into looking unfazed by it. They've seen a lot of things, but never a slave quite that young. And it's obvious, he knew they existed, but seeing it is another thing. Especially here, where she seems like a cruel afterthought to the enforced sexuality of the other slaves who all look like game show grinners all down their bodies except for the numb faces.

The night before was when Jill finally told Jim, as if he needed to really understand this to accept her previous apology, what had happened to make her hate Starfleet so much. She'd started by saying that she'd been bought and owned by a commander during her childhood and really, she could have stopped there, because that was enough and Jim has almost suspected as much. But she gave him the rest because she needed him to understand, and like she wouldn't be brave enough to say it again for a very long time, and he let her.

Her owner had only ever had her call him Tony, and that was the only thing she ever knew him by. Jill remembers being happy the day she was purchased. Tony was kind to her, treating her in every way like he had simply wanted to adopt a child; not knowing any better, Jill began to think of him as her father. He gave her much more of an education than the usual slave could hope to have. She could read whatever she wanted, she could pick out what she wore, and if she was never permitted to leave his room on the ship, she never thought anything of the locked door.

Then one day, after owning her for years, Tony brought another slave home: a Romulan male a few years older than she was. Out of jealousy, she hated him instantly. She wasn't given as much food as before and was told that it was because Tony had to provide for the boy as well. Tony treated him with vague derision, as if to impress upon Jill that he was inferior, as much of a burden to him as to her.

And one day he took them both down to shore leave with him, saying that it was for a special occasion. While Tony was taking a nap, the boy sternly warned Jill to be quiet. And then he used what strength he had to hold the man down long enough to stab him with his own switchblade.

He stabbed him six times. It took Jill the next six years of running with the boy to forgive him for existing, to forgive him for killing Tony, to forgive him for being the only thing she had in the world.

Jill didn't say up until that point—but Jim didn't have to be told, from the way she looked when she explained—that the boy had been Tom.

It was years and years after, when she was a woman, when she was in the company of other escaped slaves on Earth that she learned the "common practices" from her friend Maria, who Jill vividly remembers blurting out over a couple beers, "You realize he was going to force you two to fuck sooner or later?"

Maybe as some sickly means of getting his rocks off without the girl actually hating him, like he was only a gentle enough man to need some filter over what it is to do that to a kid; maybe some other circuitous way of planting a sense of safety between him and Jill that he could later exploit. Maria hadn't known, but she was so certain it had to be something like that, like this was something she'd heard of again and again. Jill wanted to punch her in the face over it, didn't think it added up, but when she started to think about the way Tom had always been with her growing up, distant and fiercely protective in equal measures, it slowly roared into some sense for her.

And when Jill had told Jim this, it was the first time, even after how far they'd all gone to prove they couldn't stand for these things, that he was forced to put a face to everything. And suddenly he was flooded with the images of so many alien people he'd met back home; all the friendly acquaintances he'd sat next to in training and met at the outposts and accepted into his crew, he wondered, were they somewhere here too, being sold and stripped of every last virtue or good word there was to be said. He couldn't help praying that they simply didn't exist.

That hilarious bartender who worked some of the academy-catered events. That librarian who somehow memorized everyone's names so that you wouldn't have to get out your ID code. The cadet who had shivered wonderfully when being kissed on her shoulders; her roommate, also foreign, who they'd thrown a small party for when her parents couldn't make it into the country for a holiday. And Gaila...

He didn't sleep at all last night.

He gets up.

It takes only a look at Nyota for her to furrow her brows and say some polite word to the man at the table, get up and follow him into the little hallway where some jackets are hanging. They back up a bit out of sight.

"Hey," Jim interrupts her before she can ask anything. "I won't be able to watch, so don't worry when you don't see me out there, okay?"

She stammers, "Okay, what—"

"Get out of here as soon as possible when you're done. We'll have the car outside the west door waiting for you. Okay?...You're gonna knock them dead, you know." He wants to say more, but he doesn't want her to worry. So he settles on, "You look beautiful," and he kisses her on her temple, a helpless aching worry making it fervent and final.

She's clearly jumpy and worried anyway and wants to ask what's going on, but she's supposed to get to the stage now. After he gives her his best reassuring smile she anxiously ducks back out of the hall, and he can sense her forcing herself into cool and calm even across the distance.

"Bones."

"...Yeah?" the voice comes back quickly on his communicator.

"Pull up, about half a block away in the back."

"Already?"

"Yeah." Jim adds, "It could be a few minutes," and then cuts it off.

He's mostly watching across the crowd for the next few minutes, and he does get to see the beginning of Nyota's performance as he's leaning into the threshold at the edge of the hallway. It slides into the noise and takes him by surprise, because he isn't looking at the stage anymore by the time she's gotten up there.

Nyota's singing voice had a ghostly status to him thus far; he's heard it from the other side of the shower door, or from another room, but he's never seen her sing. It feels in a way the opposite of how a song will seem to sound better when you close your eyes and take it in, because seeing it come out of her is the first time it feels gorgeous and full and grieving. The song is not a love song, but she sings it like everyone in the audience has broken her heart, and he can tell that the feeling of it is somehow transfixing; some people are still muttering to each other at the front, the servers serving, glasses being raised. But slowly.

She's at the second verse when he sees the girl disappear into the back kitchen door, moves back into the hall. He checks around and then snatches a coat off of the rack, folding it neatly over his arm and striding across the ballroom at a steady go.

Walks back to the offices, looks around again, this time waiting longer.

He finally takes the chance to step quickly into the back hallway, scanning around for some direction that seems to make sense. There is a nicely furnished office visible through the door on his right; he goes for the more dull-looking lines of doors down in the other direction.

When one of them opens, he's planning his act of stupid visitor, and then notices it's a slave.

"Hey," he walks up, and the young man looks at him nervously. "Do you know the young girl, the little one that's—"

The kid's shaking his head automatically, as if he's always getting mistaken for effective customer service.

"I don't even know how—" He shakes his head, feeling ridiculous and frantic. "There was a very young girl working as a servant; I want to free her. Can you bring her to me?"

The Orion is extremely wary. He looks him up and down, backing up as if he plans to put up a fight. And before Jim has any grasp on what to say next, he suddenly goes through the door he just came out of.

Jim has his lips pressed firmly together. He takes a shifting half-step forward, pauses, and then bluntly walks right in after.

The small uproar is immediate, nine or so of the slaves looking his way and disputing with the one who just came in. One finally comes straight forward, and suddenly a woman is slapping Jim across the face, alarmingly hard.

He's leaning over in astonishment, still recovering when she kicks him sharply in the right shin.

"Fucking. Jesus. Fucking. Mother. _Fuck_." He manages to seethe quickly through it, but before he can stand up straight again she knocks a punch to his face that lands badly aimed but still lands his back sharply against the wall.

Rubbing vaguely at where she punched him, he looks back at her, eyes placid steel. He's beginning to suspect what this is, some test of his character that's about all they can do in limited time.

He shrugs as he stands back up straight. "We can do this all day, but I'm not gonna hit you back."

And after a second she looks at him intently, an inner battle flicking in her eyes.

"I'm from the Knot. Do you know what that means?"

She doesn't seem to, but one of the other servants goes wide-eyed, grabs her arm and says something fast and quiet.

"You can't let him take Madda," one of the others suddenly wails. "Please."

"Don't be selfish, Noni," the woman in front of Jim is scolding, not turning her glance away from him. He wonders if she's also saying it to herself.

Another one in the small throng, a man, is the first to take action. "We don't have time to argue."

What happens next Jim will never completely figure out; some form of cryptic democracy with a set of code they all know like the back of their hands. It's intriguing, thinking why they would often need it, especially when it's among a species he's only ever come across as the most politically unorganized pirates running around the galaxy. But they're clearly well organized and respectful of it, and Jim is impressed with the fact that it probably saves him a _lot_of time.

"Sona?"

"Second law."

"Noni."

"Third law."

"Bela."

"Second."

"Manyl."

"Second."

He turns to the woman who was striking Jim before, already knowing, but she says, "Second."

"That's majority in favor," the man quips, not seeming eager to shut down the young girl who's crying now, but immediately turns to Jim. "Go to the bathroom."

"The _main_bathroom?" Jim's eyebrows go up, but he doesn't argue; he looks around for just a flicker before leaving as fast as he came in.

He goes, and he waits, wondering if this is all some elaborate distraction and they're really way too distrustful of him and somebody's gonna come in here after somebody's told the authorities. He's starting to feel anxious about Nyota. He can't help it; even when he knows she's charismatic enough not to be suspicious at all, there's that fucking brand, it's always there. They did their homework and almost wanted to pull out of the whole thing when they knew for sure that neither of them would be let into the club with a phaser, but Nyota was the one to point out that one gun against a security team wouldn't have been much help in any case if they were recognized. As if that made any of them feel better.

Jim lets out a breath when the door of the bathroom opens; now it's a teenager he didn't meet before and she's chattering quickly in Orion with the girl, crouching down to give her what sounds like commands and reassurances. She finally leads the child over to Jim with a final, somewhat emotional baby-sitterly squeeze.

"She doesn't like to talk much," she warns Jim. "But at least she'll be quiet. You're going out this window."

"There's more security working that side—"

"It is the best way out. One of us is going to attempt some kind of diversion to get one of them away, but you don't have time to wait and see if it works." Jim ignores the grim thought of what kind of reprimand is coming to whoever tries to "divert" a member of security.

She has already taken the coat and started helping Madda into it, tucking her hair into the hood. "You'll have to go back in and leave through the rehearsal room."

And hope nobody notices that he's carrying somebody green. Right.

He can't help asking, "Has anybody ever done this before?"

"People have tried before. Maybe even for the right reasons." She considers him. "Though you're the first to come to us about it first, so you have a chance."

The window is wide and easy to get out of, and they're lucky that the locked bathroom door is only getting pounded on when they're in the process of letting the girl down into his arms. She's unresistant out of obedience; even in the middle of all the urgency he has the compulsion to mutter something to her.

"You ready to blow this joint, honey?" He's saying this once he's made it onto the balcony-style roof level that is mostly decorative, not even that far off the ground, but he knows if he wasn't told to run off that way that it's probably a bad idea. He finally finds a patio-style door propped open and just walks in with the least suspicious bravado he can manage; thankfully no one's in the little smoking room, but he hears some voices right around the entrance.

He hikes up the girl into a sturdier grasp, holds his breath as it ends up being a matter of ducking out while none of the guests just outside are looking his way, then just falling into a casual stride.

He hasn't walked straight into this bad a risk since he was on missions regularly, but his spine is still there, his brawn pulsing steady through the actions as he makes it down the little hall, sees the rehearsal room, goes in.

There are about fourteen people, several of them crowded closer to the piano in the corner, the rest sitting down looking tired or being chatty. None of them look over at him, except for one woman who gives the stern look of knowing he isn't supposed to be there but not really caring; and a man standing looking out the back door, who looks over, and looks straight down at the bundle of coated little girl in his arms.

Something jumping in his chest, Jim grins. "Cold out there." Overly friendly, like the man was observing that his daughter was cute or something. The man cocks his eyebrow, and looks back out the window.

Jim understands why he was told to leave here when he notices that security can probably see him but only from afar; by the time he's reached the front walkway he's probably too much of a blur for them to even realize he isn't just carrying some kind of instrument.

Holy fuck, but he actually reaches the car.

Bones seems to jolt in inattentive surprise when Jim pulls open one of the back doors, quickly smuggling him and Madda into the back.

He's sitting behind the passenger seat, settling her in the middle seat with light calming gestures. "As soon as she gets here, you take off, but don't take 56, take the highway."

Bones is looking into the back. Then forward. Then back again, slowly.

"...What is that?" he evenly demands.

"Her name is Madda."

Bones is giving Jim a horrified glare, like how dare he pull that without telling him he was going to pull it, looking at the girl again with a gaping indecision in what he wants to say, when they hear the sudden fast click of heels.

The left back door opens and a swish of silky burgundy lands into the opposite seat. Bones starts driving, and Nyota's saying, "The piano guy got so chatty afterward, I..."

She stills right in the middle when she notices the girl. Then she is looking at Jim like she has never seen him before.

"Do you know if Jill might be at the house?" Jim asks.

"No..." Bones answers, still clumsy with incredulity. "I was just talking to Scotty, I don't think she's around."

"I was thinking we could ask her what we should probably do."

"We can't take care of her," Nyota says, but is almost beaming at the girl; Jim can tell she's resisting the instinct to comfort her physically, and she only fingers her dress and says, "Put on the music. Maybe she likes it."

She almost seems to, and though they're steeling with anxiety all the way to the highway, a giddy disbelief is washing over everyone by the time they're a third of the way home.

"You _stole_ a _slave_!"

Jim and Nyota are grinning at the outburst while he dutifully corrects, "You can't steal a person, Bones."

"Fine, you fucking freed somebody. You are honest to hell crazy, Jim, I don't think I even want to know how close you just came to—"

"That's not all," Nyota is biting her lip under the grin; just as Jim looks over she's pushing a credit chip into his hand. His eyes are doing lightning strikes between her and it before he pushes the button to check the number, and practically croons.

"Holy _hell_!"

She almost keels over in laughter while reaching to put the chip away.

"You _won_?"

She's nodding and nodding and everything is giddy and bouncing as he lets out another laugh and leans over and they're holding each other's faces for a happy impulsive kiss before they even realize they're crowding over Madda and then just laughing about it more.

Madda finally warms up to Nyota enough to start talking idly, but Jim can only pick up a few words and phrases in Orion. He doesn't like that she seems to be all buckled down and obedient, like she's not really able to perceive them with the trust she'd give a fellow Orion. It just frustrates him that it's hard to be sure how scared she is.

When they finally arrive at the front gate, Charlie slowly puts her drink down next to her in confusion.

"Where did you get her?"

"Close to Manchester," Jim replies with a shrug.

While Bones is looking Madda over with a tricorder, Gene, apparently the other person working the entrance, comes up to them with a brighter form of astonishment.

"What did you guys _do_?" He crouches down in front of the girl. "Hey, you. You tired?"

"She doesn't speak a lot of Standard, I don't think," Nyota says.

"She's kinda tiny," he observes, tapping her on the nose in a teasing way, and the girl very slightly smiles. "You want some food, huh?...How is she?"

That question was directed at Bones, who gives a lilt of his head. "She could definitely use some food. She's got a cold, but she's really pretty much alright."

"We gotta get you something to chow on, string bean. And some serious sleep. Hmm?" He tweaks her nose again, looks at the rest of them. "You all look pretty tired. I'll talk to the league about what to do with her. For tonight she can stay at my place, if that's alright with you."

Bones kind of furrows his eyebrows, but Jim isn't worried. Gene wouldn't have been somebody he thought of to take her to, but he had no idea what to expect bringing an Orion girl in here and it's probably lucky they already found somebody who's compassionate about it.

"Thanks, Gene," Nyota says.

"Yeah," he just nods all casually at them, already starting to gently poise the girl away with him by the shoulders, and she goes away easy like she already trusts him.

The first thing Scotty asks later that night after evaluating with a squint that Jim has a bruise forming on his face and also that no one looks shaken, is, "You get rammy with somebody?"

"Get what?" Bones barks, laughing.

"In a fight? No," Jim provides. "...It's a long story."

"Yeah, very uneventful evening," Nyota says, slick and smiling and still looking great in that dress. And proceeds to tell him everything that happened in a way that makes Scotty certain she's kidding for an honestly ridiculously long time of trying to convince him she's not.

"How old's the girl?" he finally asks.

"I don't know. 'Bout that high," Jim puts out an arm and then shrugs. "Brown hair, cute big eyes. I have a soft spot. But Gene took her for now. She shouldn't really be with humans anyway."

"Is this what you're gonna do, then?...If we get the ship, I mean."

"What _I'm_gonna do?" Jim's look is cynical and crooked as if deterring them from something. "As if it's all up to me."

Without even coming close to answering the question, he shrugs out of his dress jacket and leaves to go get ready for bed.


	8. Apotropaism

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chapter 7

**apotropaism**

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The sign-up list for the auction goes up before the weekend. Brighton's taking first-price sealed bids all throughout the day instead of doing an open auction, and Jim works that day up until the end of his shift, then strides back in. Brighton gives him a laid-back smile, checking the list over and saying, "You're the last one, it turns out. So I guess you're gonna find out on the spot."

Jim's brows loft high, and Brighton tells him not to have a heart attack, is finishing some cleaning up at one of his shelves while Jim pretty much just stands there tapping his foot anxiously and chewing on his lip.

"Heard you brought in that girl the other day—Hell, I can't believe I didn't mention that yet, man, that's insane..."

Jim's a bit taken aback. "I didn't think that many people knew."

"Well, that tall one came by today and mentioned it. She said it was the most interesting shift she's had all year."

Brighton seems to be looking for something, and Jim just shoves his hands in his pockets to try to still them from anxiously tapping on things.

"Oh, hey, Kirk: Do me a favor and grab that stylus on the table right there?"

"Sure."

Jim gets about five steps away before he stops dead in his tracks.

For a few seconds all he can do is stand there with his eyes closed in fervent silent self-berating, his lips pressing tight together until he finally lets out a bitter, resigned breath.

When he turns around, he expects to see some kind of weapon pointed at him, some expression of grim amusement on the man's face, or maybe anger, maybe malice.

What he sees is just Brighton, his hand clenched harmlessly around the dusting rag and his body leaned into a chair, a look of relative calm on his face. Jim meets his eyes and he bothers no denial with it, knows his fear is written plainly on him, but he doesn't say or do anything.

Brighton is almost casual in how he tosses his rag down and says, "Come into the office."

So this is how it'll go.

He's been in the office many times before; once it was even for a drink and some talking about the weather. He's thinking about the general layout before they're even in there, wondering where he would probably keep a gun. As it happens, he just has to play along, sit down in the knobby chair like this is any other meeting with his boss. Instead of sitting down across from him, Brighton sits on the corner of the desk just to the side; he sets his PADD down to his left with bored abandonment.

He finally says, "You're not gonna have the highest bid."

Jim leans back, not even close to feeling like it's safe to feel relieved, but nodding like he thinks he understands. It comes out fast when he can't help starting to plead, "Listen, I'm just a man, alright? I'm trying to look after my own, that's...That's _all_."

Brighton lets out a sigh, goes on to say, "I got a very, very high bid today."

Jim clenches his teeth, knowing he has to look steady, like this is a demand he can meet. "How much do you want?"

"I'm not blackmailing you." It's almost like Brighton is confused that he doesn't get it; Jim isn't really sure. "...I'm selling you the heap."

Jim almost chokes. "I'm sorry, you're...?"

"Let me tell you a little secret, in exchange for yours," Brighton says, and it may be an entire minute of Jim's eyes darting in confusion all over him before he even begins: "Four years ago, I was living with my wife over in Tennessee. We'd been married for eight years, no kids, decent life...One day I came home to find our place ransacked, and there was a note left next to the bedroom. It was from my servant, politely informing me that my wife was dead in the bathroom, and that by the time I saw the note, he'd be long gone."

Jim looks somewhere down at his knees as a very complicated sudden emotion has him letting out a long sigh.

"I came here because I thought _maybe_. There was a chance in hell he'd come here, and I could find him, and I could kill him. And I came here and I told a lot of very good lies, and I started up this place, and I waited, and waited." Brighton's face shifts to something else then, and he shakes his head. "I thought the whole time, up until about a year ago, that the only reason I was being decent to these people was I had to wait it out so I could eventually kill that son of a bitch. I'd stayed around so long, though, it was ridiculous to think that that kid would ever show up. He could even _be_here, and just over at the Knot where I couldn't get to him.

"...I started to like the business, got used to always having terrible food. Made a couple casual friendships with my employees now and then...Then one day this Romulan kid walks in, wanting to know if I can sell him any data chips. I asked him a couple questions up until he looked me right in the face, and then I recognized him. And he knew. He knew that I knew, and we were standing there looking at each other right in front of this other customer. It felt like hours."

It's another long moment, Brighton sitting there and looking out his window before he finishes.

"And then I told him I didn't have what he was looking for, and he just nodded, and he left. I haven't laid eyes on him since." Brighton looks back down at Jim. "I don't have a story or an explanation of one thing that happened that made me change my mind, you know. What it comes down to is, sometimes you get to a time in your life when you realize maybe you aren't the man you thought you were. And look, I've been watching you, and I've been reading about this James Kirk. And maybe that's your name, but it's not who you are." Now after another moment, he scoffs, cocking his eyebrow. "You might wanna work on not answering to it. Seriously, I thought you were sharper than that."

Something resembling a laugh from Jim as he reaches and wipes a hand over his mouth, nodding. "Yeah."

"So...What's your bid?"

"Why are you..." It feels strange to use his voice again.

"I don't know that I ever really intended to sell this thing to the highest bidder. There's a reason I mostly only told my workers about it. I already wanted to give it to you when you walked in today...cause I just like you. You seem like you'd do something good with it. Not to mention you and yours obviously know how to take good care of a vessel." He smiles wryly as Jim dares a cocky scoff, like that's an understatement. "So, come on."

Brighton's pointing at the bid Jim realizes he still has clutched in an old-fashioned envelope, per his own advice of accepting material records so that nobody could hack into the previous bids. He says, "Seventeen."

"You're not gonna try to do better than that?" Brighton laughs; his features are set back into familiarity, his rugged face cynical and harmless.

Jim blinks, takes a second to realize. Then says, "Ten."

Brighton squints, sitting back. "Fifteen."

"Eleven."

"Fourteen."

Jim feels himself smirking. "Eleven."

"I'm not going lower than thirteen."

"Eleven, and I'll fix and clean your Civilius."

"No shit?" He reaches out his hand. "You got a deal."

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He's made it to the little stand where an Andorian lady sells old collectible trinkets when he hears "Did you win?..." And turns to see a slightly grimacing Jill coming up to him with her little backpack on.

He's still a bit shell-shocked by the turns of the last half hour, and Jill's expression drops as she assumes wrong. "Shit," she says.

"'Shit' what? We got it."

It takes him about five more times of rewording the fact for her to realize he's serious, and then it's like the best joke she's ever heard, the way she leans over in never-stopping laughter that Jim has to join in on because it's really starting to hit him too.

"What's so funny?" he demands. Jill has sometimes confused him on some level of undefinable incompatibility of some kind between them, but there are times like this when she just resonates with real laughter in the middle of so much cold, even when it's a cruel joke, when he knows he kind of gets what it is about her that makes Scotty a little crazy. "Seriously, what?"

"It's just..." She points a thumb behind her. "I just had the biggest fight with Khamak. Huge, huge fight. I don't think...well. I know we're not getting married."

"Oh, well..." He can't stop snickering. "That's too bad."

"Shut the hell up."

"No, you should be kissing my ass right now."

"Funny thing is," she's putting a finger up as she says, "I was coming over cause I have something for you. Come on, you wanna go for a walk?"

A while later they're sitting against the wooden wall next to the occasional green patches of grass close to the front gate, which still faintly states those blood-colored words he won't forget any time soon.

"I hoped so badly you guys would win that ship the second I found out you wanted it," she's saying with sudden sincerity. "Even when I was only mostly sure you'd take anyone else...That is kind of weird, though, that he just wanted to give it to you. I guess he just wanted it in good hands?"

"Some good hands." He has a small look of incredulity. "If I was him, I would've sold us out. Hell, if I were you, I would've blown the lid on us so fast..."

"Well. You're not me." She's getting into her bag now. "I told you I was going to make that up to you. I've been working on this for a while."

Jim has almost forgotten she said she had something for him. When she puts something into his hands, it's wrapped in cloth, and quite heavy. He stills, looking at her. He only feels at it a little before saying, "Seriously?"

"Go on." She nudges his arm.

"I can't accept this, you don't even have—"

"Oh, but you have to," she corrects, "I already engraved it for you."

Now narrowing his eyes, he takes the soft cloth off to reveal a very odd-looking handgun. The metal has a slightly irregular texture, marbling between iron and rust colors; the barrel is bulky and almost a cylindrical shape but hollow enough to be balanced by the smirky western-style curved handle. If he overlooks any expectations of what he'd expect a gun to look like, there is something that feels handsome and timeless about it.

Turning it over, he finds the engraving in a smooth feel under one of his thumbs. In a subtle imprint along the barrel where a brand name might run more boldly, it quietly reads,

_Some luck for the good captain. Love, J_

Jim wants to laugh about the wit inherent in the gift, but something is clenching at him, a toppling sudden emotion and he is simply, deeply moved. A moment passes of him thinking about what he could possibly say, until he finally manages to give her a wry expression. "Anything in particular that makes it lucky?"

Jill grins wide, like she had to wait to see if he'd ask, already motioning for him to give it back for a minute and saying, "You know me better than I thought."

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.

Jim of course invites Jill over, but she seems to succumb to a heavier mood by the time they're walking back, and just says, "Send everybody my congratulations." He knows she isn't exactly avoiding Scotty, but she kind of is. They're still visiting each other, but there's a wall gone up, this fact that sooner rather than later they may really have to say goodbye to each other, regardless of who gets the ship. And as much as it works for people like them not to make anything of it they can't always deny that it's there.

The other three are all waiting on needles on the porch and giving silent looks of expectation when he comes home. Nyota is slowly rising to take the news standing, and he drags it out a bit in a poker face, making Bones go, "Oh no..."

He's shrugging then, breaking slowly out into a grin. "Let's go get it."

"_What_?" Scotty's off the step and clapping his arms around Jim during the quick tumble into cheers all around, and Jim can only laugh and forget about any other part of the story.

Jim manages to finally interrupt all the questioning and exclamations, "Scotty, you and I can go get it and put it in the back. After that, I want two things." He counts off with his fingers: "I want booze, and I want fried chicken."

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An hour of Scotty cussing the clunky vessel into obedience as if it needs to be broken in and it's finally in the yard, Nyota squinting and laughing from the back door as she can hear how Jim can't stop whooping and yelling, "This ugly fuckin' thing is ours!"

Naturally it attracts a bit of attention around the front of the house, but she and Leonard have to wade through it without comment to go out and happily procure Jim's demands. A couple hours later they've put down an arm and a leg for the chicken and some wine from the mixed abundance of alcohol products to be had from the Knot taverns, and they throw a picnic out back on the huge fleece blanket they keep in the living room. Nyota smiles at the amused reactions when she emerges wearing the dress just because she figures she won't have any other occasion for it any time soon.

"Do you really want to talk shop right now?" Jim is replying to Leonard as he takes a sip of the wine from their plastic cups.

"I'm just asking, cause sometimes it seems like maybe you have some actual semblance of a plan? In your secretive bastard kinda way?"

Jim laughs shortly. "Get as many people out of here as possible, for starters."

Leonard just gives him a prodding look.

"Well, the ship will take anywhere up to three months—that's what Scotty guessed—to fix up, cause it all depends on what we can find, not so much what we can buy. Of course there's other stuff we need." Jim starts to talk more like reading from a mental list. "We could all use some nice sets of clothes. We somehow probably need to have some back-up form of fake credit, anything that even temporarily looks legitimate. And...we need weapons. Like a lot of weapons."

Even though the list should be overwhelming, Jim says it with the kind of intent that feels reassuring after all this time of inner flailing and just trying to keep at the surface of things. They soon fall into a much lighter mood, something that reminds Nyota more of times back from working together. Long after night has fallen the back yard glows with the most bittersweet feeling of a tectonic shift, affection ebbing more richly than before between all of them.

She finally carries her cup over with her to get a look inside the ship. They've already hauled the old couch from the living room into the bridge, which is a much less high-maintenance affair than a Starfleet vessel, only bearing one pilot's seat. The layout of the ship is so much more simple-minded, the function of every room less cut and dry just from looking at it, almost like your average empty house. On the outside it looks long and narrow, the nacelles wing-like and not very large. It's certainly not a beautiful ship, but she could get used to it.

She stays up there looking out the front at where the occasional twinkle of a house light can be seen in the distance until she realizes the noise of talking outside has disintegrated. She then hears somebody on the ship ladder, recognizes Jim by his footsteps. The sound pauses and she realizes he's just leaning in on the ladder looking up at her.

She turns with a little smile to walk over to him. "They've gone to bed?"

He nods, and she makes a motion to the side with her head. And she says, "'Ulysses'? You going to keep it like that?

To her surprise, he rolls his eyes a little bit. "I don't know. Scotty hates mythological ship names for some reason...I think it's bad luck."

"Since when are you superstitious?" She sneers, as if calling his bullshit, saying, "And how is it bad luck?...He got home, didn't he?"

"Yeah, _he_did." Jim shakes his head, smirking. "But you don't come limping home after losing the rest of your shipmates and get to say you're a good sailor. Not that he doesn't spend a good amount of the epic crying into his soup about it, if I remember right. And hey, I can't shoot an arrow through any axes, so maybe I shouldn't talk."

She gives that smile always accompanied by her eyes moving upwards, as if at some deity that understands her own amusement. "I'd like to see you try with a phaser."

He laughs lowly at that while he gets out of the way so she can come down the ladder, but once she's at the bottom she doesn't move to go in yet. He sits comfortably leaning in on the metal until she finishes her wine and tosses the cup somewhere in the grass. It's getting cold outside and she wraps her arms over herself a little, glancing idly back at Jim.

Something about him sitting on the silver rung like that, his hair tussled up just slightly in the wind, and she has this memory blinking forward in her mind. The kind you remember and wonder the moment you remember if it would've gotten away from you for good if you hadn't had some reason to think of it just then.

Back when they were in San Francisco, she went to a track meet by herself. The place wasn't very crowded, and she thought she had an entire row of a bleacher to herself until she looked and saw Jim Kirk sitting on the other end. And all he did when she saw that she saw him was nod in her direction. Not smile at her in that cocky way he had, not do anything to show he was sitting there to do anything but read a book and occasionally glance at the sport; it seemed like he had come there just to be uninterrupted for a while. Completely out of character for what she knew about him at the time.

After some minutes, she did what she would've done with anyone else she knew from the academy; she sighed and stood up and came over and sat next to him. He didn't look up from what he was reading, but he smiled when she did that. She was the first one to volunteer conversation.

Eventually she mentioned that she used to run the fastest 100 meter dash at her school. "It's been a while since I was in shape for it. I don't think I could do it anymore."

And he said, "Oh, I bet you could," without even thinking about it. Not the way you say something like that when it's to be polite or flattering, but the way you say something when you have no reason other than just believing in somebody. As if he already considered her somebody he really knew.

And while she acknowledged that he might have said it in the more insincere manner if they were around anyone else, she let herself forget that until the half hour or so later when he said, "See you around" and stood up to leave her alone again. She can't remember now what else they talked about, but there's a simple clarity attached to the memory, like a smell you associate with a season, and something moves.

It didn't change the way she thought about him at the time, possibly even irritated her more that he was so inconsistent, seemingly artificial. But remembering it now, it's like some thin thread of possibility that's been following her around for years, precarious and poetic and invisible and maybe in another life it would have never meant anything to her at all. But here now she feels herself sliding into the presence of him, and she wants this thing, she wants to let him make her forget where she is. She wants to ask him if he remembers that day, but it isn't something she could tell him; it's not a fact or a feeling, only a memory.

"I'm sorry if I was an asshole," Jim is saying.

She almost laughs at the sudden comment. "What?"

"When I came home that night. You know." He's lazily slipping down the ladder, gets to the ground but just leans onto it by a hand on the side. "...It's just, I don't know what's going on or what you're thinking but you keep looking at me kind of weirdly since it happened. And if I made you feel like I'm starting to resent you, or something...That's not what I meant."

She thinks about saying about a dozen other things, but ends up quietly replying, "You think I resent you, though."

He gives this low sigh, like he doesn't want to push this. But he says, "Like for not being somebody else?"

Before she can make some pleading assuring reply that's rising in her, he interrupts.

"I mean, we could talk about that. I could tell you that it's not easy for me either, how impossibly unfair the whole thing feels when I think about him and how maybe I get guilty about _you_ because that's the only way I can feel like he's my friend now." There's something self-mocking in his tone, in a little scoff he gives. "Like I miss it even being relevant. Telling myself every little bit by bit that if I could just not fall in love with you, somehow, somewhere, he'd know how much I miss him. As if that makes any sense. As if it even _works_," he adds, shrugging weakly at the grass. "...But I think you already know."

Jim is resting his shoulder at the side of the ladder when she looks now, and Nyota's thoughts stagger at the sight of him, like she's looking at what she'd see if she hadn't seen him in years as well as through her own eyes. He's wearing torn-up jeans and the same shirt he wore yesterday and the day before, his muscles look half-starved and his eyes a little sunken with ache and exhaustion and he is fifty times the man she ever thought he could be when she met him and she doesn't know why the first thing out of her mouth is a very small and astonished "You love me?"

The look in those eyes is almost startled, blue and open before his gaze wanders back to the ground, before he tries to figure what he wants to convey or say. She takes a few steps forward and as they turn into hers a little more solidly, she gives up on talking, gives up on facts, kisses him.

He makes a sound and there's a pause, no one pulling away but the kiss resting for the motion of other things, his hands meeting around her waist; they have kissed before but it never quite feels like they have. She could not define how he does it; she couldn't say what it's like to kiss him. He does it now very slowly, his eyes open and looking brittle at the edge of abandon until she closes hers. She pushes against him until he's sharply rooted against the ladder and responding in full feeling, one arm tightening around her waist, and the air seems to hit her skin even colder now where he isn't touching it and she burrows in and just—_kisses_—

One hand is grasping at her face now, and he leads for a little bit now in little shuddering tastes, stilling in the tiniest moments as if to measure, to make sure, but even in the lapses they stay tangled and don't breathe away from each other's mouths for another minute before he finally makes a sweet little sound, kind of a laugh.

"Hmm?" she hums when he kisses his way over to her ear.

"Um." He mutters, "I don't want to get your dress dirty."

She slowly smiles and then tells him to get the blanket back out.

Later when he's unzipping her his mouth reverently finds the place at her neck that still seems to tingle white-hot when she's conscious of it, a chilling sting of a tongue against it and she feels so achingly loved, the shape sharpened into white stars. He lulls into her and the darkness around them sings.

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Gene and Jill are bickering snidely where they sit next to the porch on the sunny, festering day when they start taking names for the trip out. People keep coming with cash, and Nyota shakes her head tiredly and says, "It's first-come, first-serve."

"We've got fifteen places left," Jim says to the one Bajoran family that lives close by. "You're good to go, just make sure you don't change your mind. And bring as much food as you can."

"An' a sleeping bag if you've got it," Scotty adds.

"It'll probably be only half an hour more until we're closed," Jill points out as they watch the family walking away. "So he's got that long."

"Would you stop?" Gene snaps, looking miserable enough that Madda instinctively looks up from her pretzels and squeezes his knee; he gets an apologetic look in his eyes and goes back to the messy attempt at plaiting her hair.

A pair of Romulans have been approaching, and Nyota's the one who goes for the list on the PADD; when she looks up she sees a young adult female, accompanied by a younger male. The boy halts, scrutinizing her. She looks back, feeling like there's something familiar about him, until she realizes why.

"_You_." It's that kid who stole the phaser from Marcon.

The woman as well as everyone else is looking between the two of them, at Nyota's scolding eyes on the suddenly dreading look on the Romulan's face.

"You could have saved me a lot of trouble if you'd just shot that bastard, you know."

"I am sorry," he stammers in an accented mumble.

He looks truly ashamed, even if it's only for the benefit of what he needs. Nyota's wrath is more like she's wringing out a mild grudge than anything else, and she sighs as she lifts up the stylus. "How many?"

"It wasn't because...you...because you're human," he interrupts uncertainly.

"I appreciate that," she says, her voice flatter this time. "...You're just a kid, anyway."

"I don't imagine you're going to explain what the hell you're going on about?" Jim says.

Nyota interrupts by explaining the routine jist in Romulan, since she noticed the woman had an accent, "_We are following a lead on the location of a refugee shelter; after that, we don't know, but locations will be democratically chosen within the realm of whatever's reasonably safe. You get let off when you want. We're providing medical care, we're not _promising_ food, but we'll try. Be amenable with everyone else and we won't have any problems. Does that cover any questions you had?_"

The woman, recovering from the wide-eyed realization that she's so comfortable speaking the language, nods and thanks her. Nyota asks a couple more questions and then puts their names in. As the two are leaving, nobody gets the chance to ask anything before they notice Alel approaching from the street.

It's not much of a surprise to most of them, but Gene falls into this look almost like he can't believe he has the audacity to be there. Nyota wonders if she's the only one who isn't extremely obvious about looking between the two of them as Alel gives him an inscrutable expression and pointedly looks mostly at the ground after that.

"Madda, go inside for a few minutes?" Gene suggests; it's as if he predicts he's about to have some kind of outburst, and doesn't know whether it's going to be the good kind or the bad kind. The girl submits quietly, and Jim is the first to speak after that.

"What do you do, Alel?" he asks, picking up the PADD. It's the first question he's been asking every potential passenger all day.

Squinting, Gene blurts, "You're not..."

"I've studied a lot of...physics," Alel stammers his reply, and it's like he's already been told by someone else what they would be asking, has been making sure he wouldn't slip up on his Standard. "I have no specific dietary needs or allergies. I am capable of heavy lifting..."

"You're fine. Three spaces, right?"

Jim is already putting it down, but Alel says, "One."

This is when Nyota looks over at Gene and sees him stilled in shock, looking vaguely guilty.

Alel has this defensive, devastated air to him. "It's just me," he clarifies.

Gene gulps out, "But you said, if you couldn't convince them to—"

"I know what I said." Alel rushes out the rest: "I changed my mind. May I put this inside?" Now they all understand the hiking pack he's carrying.

"They threw you out?"

Alel ignores Gene, but not coldly, and Scotty tells him he's welcome to leave it wherever he wants. Nyota meets eyes with Jim as the young man passes politely between them.

There is a second or two after Alel's gone in, and then Jill practically kicks Gene, who just gives her this lost and open gesture.

"What? If he wants to be—"

"_Jesus_, you kids are hopeless," Leonard is the one to interrupt, which startles all of them. Emphatic, he tells Gene, "He just made quite possibly the hardest decision of his entire life and it landed on you, it's not astrophysics. You _go after him_."

And Gene, who has probably spoken all of a couple words with the doctor before outside of medical checks, responds as if chastised, muttering, "Uh, yessir" before getting up and going inside.

Scotty is intently communicating something wordless with Jill, and she's making a slow, overwhelmed motion with her head before she seems to dismiss the whole emotion with, "I'm so glad that's over. I was about to kick his ass if he didn't start seeing straight."

Leonard gives her a somewhat taken aback expression.

"Yeah, I'm being insensitive, but after the riots I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for the people who can't take a warning when it slaps them in the face. Alel doesn't go for this messianic _ryakna_, he's just loyal."

Scotty chuckles darkly. "I thought you thought it was a beautiful religion."

"That's the thing, it's what Alel himself said to me the other day, he comes to me freaking out, cause he doesn't understand it. He said, 'If we're supposed to be so important, if we're so powerful, why can't we take the chance to save ourselves instead of waiting?' But his family looks at this, Romulans leaving with the _hevai_—What they see is the sheep dragging the shepherds, like it's some test for them to recognize this and wait to be saved by something else...And Gene's been crawling out of his skin thinking Alel's just going to wait around here to get attacked again. I'm not even kidding, I would've kicked the little fucker's ass and dragged him kicking and biting if I had to, I don't care if he's got twice the muscles." Jill's breathing is restless and she fumes, taking out her grumpiness on the unsmoked half of her cigarette. "I'm quitting these," she says as if veering blame at it, and stomps it out under her boot before marching into the house.

By the time they've filled up the list and all had some dinner, even Alel is in a much softer mood. While it's still light out, a lot of them move outside to start digging apart the car for salvageable parts or stock metal that can be made into something else for the ship; Scotty's holding the same list he's been going at a couple times a day for weeks between his lips while he and Gene lift up the hood.

The whole system of parts that the vehicle houses is even more cryptic to Nyota than the few motors she got a glance at when she was friends with a guy who was into cars before she enlisted. Gene knocks on some bulky hollow part. "This is what you want."

"That?" Scotty squints.

"Well, not for that," he says, pointing at what Scotty's holding for reference, something that looks like a hand-sized washer with helical ridges. Jill is just coming up to them and takes it from him.

"You need one of these?"

"I need eighteen of those."

"Yawn," Jill declares, which always amuses Nyota, because she's not sure whether Romulans actually yawn. "What the hell is it, anyway?"

"It's just a boiler coil. You can make 'em out of pretty cheap stuff cause they're eventually gonna break off anyway. That's why we need so many."

"This isn't your cheap shit, so don't waste it on that," Gene continues to babble while Jill goes running off again, then is pointing at some long tubes. "Those are usually reusable even in high-powered vehicles, I don't know about vessels, though..."

Alel appears now looking immersed in thought, but smirks shyly at Gene as he comes up next to him. Gene tells him hey and grabs him by the cloth on his shoulders with no real purpose to it but to trip his hip closer into his side as he keeps talking.

"Where's little sister?" Alel asks once he can get a word in.

"Jill was just in the kitchen with her. Hey, can you help get this thing out? I'm trying, and..."

Gene has lifted the locking mechanism but he's still having trouble removing an extremely heavy part that Nyota is pretty sure by now isn't supposed to be removed manually.

"What is...?" Alel doesn't seem to know what he's looking at.

"This thing, the box...thing."

"Right, well, it definitely won't run without that, so for now we could—" Scotty stammers while Alel taps Gene out of the way, grabs at the sides of the unwieldy thing to get it in a grasp and easily flip it up out of the tricky narrow space, scrutinizing it and turning it over curiously— "or you know, why don't you just set it in the back?"

Nyota and Jim are at the edges of all this laughing silently and at Scotty nervously running a hand over the car. Jim gives him a consolation of "Hey, she gave us a good run," even proudly giving it a farewell slap himself. "Hey, Gene, how come you know so much about cars?"

"I used to steal them. No, let me rephrase that. The last person I escaped from was a car thief."

Nyota is asking, "I thought you were worked by the state before...?" and then realizes it's really none of her business.

"No. I mean, I was, but..." There's a forced nonchalance, that stammer of somebody who's mixed up their own stories. "Before all that."

"_Madda_!" Alel is scolding from just inside the front door. "_E'lev_, you not eat those..."

Gene chuckles. "She's probably bored out of her mind, we should go soon. And it looks like you guys have a visitor."

"He's just a patient, I'm sure he'll go around back," Jim says. Jill has come back out of the house, and Jim squints over towards Madda and asks her, "How is she doing?"

"You don't have to worry about her," Jill replies. "There are some people around turning their noses up, but they all know Gene would personally slaughter anybody who did anything to her. And I think she's fine. She's probably been through a lot of changes already, she's adjusting pretty fast."

"He sure as hell seems to like her, it's just...a lot of responsibility."

"Good thing we have Alel too now." Jill scoffs sweetly, realizing, "She doesn't exactly need parents as much as somebody to teach her not to do what she's told, and I can't really think of anyone better..."

"Jim," Nyota says.

She's staring off at the man standing in their yard, not entirely sure what she thinks she's seeing. Jim's too busy laughing with Jill and something Scotty just said to her, distracted.

She says louder, "Jim."

He comes to attention when the man comes up closer to them, and politely enough he asks, "Can I help you with something?"

Even with the sentence complete, there's a trailing off in the air you can practically hear, when he looks directly at him. The company senses something heavy and clears off as the moment suspends itself, until it's just the three of them, and him.

Nyota still remembers pretty vividly what it was like for her, the sleepless depression stretching for months, after her father died. And while it is simply a different kind of pain, not necessarily better or worse, she would never kid herself that she can understand what it's like never to have known one of your parents, to have lost them too young.

And to impossibly be in their presence even once, what it would affect in somebody to actually see them breathing in front of you. She can't imagine this. When something comes over Jim's face that she's never seen in him before she doesn't know if he's going to break down into tears or just pass out or...

Maybe just groan, "Oh, holy shit," his hand knocking into the car as something pushes him off balance.

"Listen, you don't all need to panic, I'm just here to talk. And first of all," he says to Jim with a steadying motion, hesitating as if he's not sure how to say it. "I know that you're not really my son."

Jim opens his mouth, and shuts it, and there's a long, long moment of him blinking and thinking before he demands, "You've been talking to Spock?"

He nods.

"Alright." Suddenly domineering and just nodding several times, Jim demands, "I'm gonna need an explanation, and I mean now."

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.

Jim probably would not have idealized the first reason he had to break out his new gun as something like using it as subtle leverage with a man exactly resembling his late father, which he does by casually setting it at his side as Scotty sits at the rickety coffee table taking apart the only other firearm they own.

"Ah!" Scotty exclaims when he finally daintily holds up a long silvery-white component.

"—Oh that mother_fucker_!" Jim shouts, shooting up out of his chair.

"EL-90, is it?" George Kirk asks with a half-smirk. "Figures the bastard would have one of those just lying around in his sock drawer."

Scotty explains to everyone else, "This baby is the single most powerful tracking device known to man; you could buy an_ Enterprise _with one of them. Don't get your hopes up, though, the piecemeal components aren't worth half that."

"Son of a bitch." Jim itches his fingers at his eyes in irritation. "What the hell is he after with us?"

"I think he just wanted to keep an eye on you. Observe you, like...an experiment." George shrugs. "He was curious about all of you."

"Thought it would be fun to see how long we'd survive?" Jim suggests with a scoff.

"Wait, can it do that?" Leonard asks, looking at Scotty.

"It scans for basic life signs, yeah. I could maybe fool around with it and make us another tricorder, but I'm not making any promises."

Jim stops his pacing. "Scotty, please tell me you can still put that phaser back together functionally."

The engineer practically balks. "You can't insult me like that when you're not my commanding officer anymore." This earns him an affectionate smirk before Jim turns back on George Kirk, who's already willing to continue.

"Look, Spock's been acquainted with me for a while. I didn't expect to hear anything back from him when I tried to contact him recently, but he's not only safe, he's...got a hell of a plan going on, apparently." George raises his brows incredulously. "I wasn't really interested in the details. That wasn't most of what we talked about, really, I think he just thought it would be a good idea to inform me of what exactly happened to my son."

"So you come here for a little vacation just to say hi. Maybe they should be closing the doors again after all if it's possible for _you_ to get in." Between _George fucking Kirk_and the slight panic over the tracking device, Jim looks about ready to go out of his mind. He rakes a hand in his hair and slumps loudly back down into his chair.

"I'll admit, it's mostly curiosity. It's not every day an officer of the Imperial fleet meets somebody who persuades him to try to shake things up even when it's not for his own good, just to see what happens."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. I didn't persuade him to do anything, not on purpose at least."

"...Exactly."

"There's still something you haven't explained."

"Honestly, I don't know much of Spock's whole plan at all, if that's what you're..."

"No, that's not it." Jim stares at him a second, sits back as if resigned, as if he's given up on solving a riddle. "How the hell are you alive?"

George Kirk's eyes, blue and innocent and way too much like Jim's, come up from where they were straying a little lewdly up and down Nyota as she took a seat at the table. "...Excuse me?"

"History suggests that the events with Nero still happened with basically the same results here and there, both when Kelvin was intercepted and when Vulcan was destroyed. My father blew himself up to disarm Nero; if he hadn't done it, _I_wouldn't be alive."

"...But that would've been when you were born."

"I never knew my father."

"Shit." George sits back and gets this old regret in his expression. "We thought we would have to surrender the ship, but I'd been working on this theoretical explosive technique; it uses these ionic interruptions to cause destructive waves, so you can create it almost anywhere in space, supposedly. By some happy accident, in the heat of the moment, I thought of it and was able to use it just well enough to send Nero packing for a while. But I was never able to recreate the results later."

By now Scotty and Leonard are exchanging looks, and they're muttering to each other some excuse to leave, as if it seems like this is all a bit personal. Nyota shifts up from where her elbows were resting on the table and when her hands drop to her lap Jim reaches and squeezes one, and she looks up to see him looking deeply pensive for a few seconds.

"If you have any notes on what you had of that technology..." He's making himself not be optimistic. "Could I look at it?"

The small laugh George lets out is very, _Of course you would ask that_, and something is both nostalgic and bitter in the way he explains, "I don't have them anymore. My son stole them. When he left home, he copied all the data and then sabotaged all my experiment logs. I guess he just wanted to prove he could do better. I heard that he was still working on it right after he enlisted...but I guess he got bored with the idea by the time he had his own ship."

"So how about Winona?" Jim quietly asks after another hesitation.

"We're not together anymore," George says neutrally. "She's working between outposts on the other side of the quadrant, hardly ever visits home...James was always in better touch with her. I'd tell her what happened to him, but then she'd want to know what's going on with _you_."

"Not such a good idea."

"No. Definitely not." George scrutinizes Jim for a second. "I'm not about to tell you it's _wrong_to be here, but there are certain things about it I don't really get. It's not like they've made it illegal to not own napes. You could always watch your own back, hell, just...Pretend one or two of your friends out here is really your slave, it would help everyone out."

"We probably would've been caught if we'd decided to do something like that," Nyota cuts in, and it's the easy argument to make out of so many responses she could say. "People can recognize us, especially out there..."

"Yeah, but I wanted to tell you I could make it work out for you. I own a really big place out in Alaska. It wouldn't be ideal, but it'd be nice."

"What's in it for you?" Jim suddenly asks. George seems a bit taken aback. "It's never going to be as simple as throwing on a pair of shades when we have to run out for groceries." He then thinks to indicate at Nyota, who is already pulling her hair over, exposing the side of her neck.

George's face falls and he even seems speechless. "I'm really sorry. That's just awful."

"Unless you have that reaction to every 'nape' you see in your neighborhood? I really don't want to hear about it." Nyota didn't even think before she said it, but maybe Jim wanted to, judging from how his hand tightens around hers for a second. George looks truly offended, and confused.

"Listen," Jim sets forth, "you may not think something is in this for you, but I don't understand why you're here, and I'm pretty sure you're not going to stay. Maybe you feel some kind of debt to me, maybe it's screwing with your head that you're never gonna see your kid again. But you need to understand that while you might, in some abstract stretch of the imagination, _be _my father...I'm sure as hell not your son."

They feel just uncomfortable enough about the sudden bitter turn to show him out the front door. Just as George is about to leave, he hesitates, remembering something.

He's handing over a key card for a house."If you're really heading off in that ship soon, you might wanna make a stop at the address that's programmed in there. James had all these houses scattered all over the planet—He hardly ever lived in most of them. This house is the only one he owned under his own name, it's the only one I know about. I'm sure you can handle making a break-in. There may not be any money there, but you'd probably find some weapons."

When he's finally gone, Nyota and Jim are standing on the porch after following him out. Jim flicks the card idly between his finger and then just sets it on the railing and looks at it with an expression on his face like he can't explain the emptiness of a victory. She pulls him in and wraps her arms at his waist, feeling the unrest in how he's breathing, that he's still reeling from everything.

"Tell me what to do," he finally quietly says. "We can't go very long without anybody putting faces to actions, right? It's like...I want people to know us just for what we do, but I'm always going to be seen as this other man. Is it even possible for us to tell everyone the truth?"

"What if it's better that way?" She lifts her head from his chest to look up at him. "If you let people believe that it's always been the same man, that that level of contrition is actually possible..."

Jim's eyes narrow in thought, his mouth creeping up at the edges. He shakes his head. "But it's a lie."

She bites at her bottom lip for a second, her voice a little small when she replies. "Sometimes it's logical enough to lie if it's for honest ends. If everything you stand for is real."

She puts her thumb at his chin, turning his distant eyes onto hers.

"You're not a lie," she says.

.

.

.

.

The house is hard to find even in its pronounced white solitude out in the middle of the country somewhere in Kansas, as it's surprisingly small for a two-story. They land the ship behind it and it takes Jim several minutes of vague dread to even initiate the first step out of the ship. The air tucks and licks at his clothes like a cold impersonal welcome when his boots hit the dirt off the last step of the ladder.

When they finally go inside, what is the most disorienting is how normal it looks, like a relatively undecorated hunting resort.

No pictures adorn the walls; a broken viewscreen sits in front of the gigantic couch, and there's one pair of boots in the closet he can't bring himself to take even if he could use the extra shoes. The guns to be found there are just displayed in a cabinet, so they don't have to look hard. They pile up the emergency supply of food that's in the chilly little cellar, but they don't find much else to take. Jim wanders about in an anxious haze, dissecting and avoiding corners of the place in equal measure. The medicine cabinet is familiarly stocked with the right medicine for his own allergies and headaches; he owns nothing of what he finds here, but there's nothing he wouldn't use. He's not sure what he expected.

He can't and doesn't explain to the others how it makes him feel. It's almost like the cave again: one of the only times in his life a place has ever really gotten under his skin, made him feel like it could be haunted. The place breathes with some frigid apparition, and it's like his bones know something he doesn't, that it's the loneliest place in the world.

Nyota comes up to hold his hand when he's standing in the middle of the kitchen, and he says he wants to burn it down.

At the end of the long driveway Bones scowls in confusion after tilting his head to see what Jim inscribes on the old-fashioned mailbox by branding at the metal with their phaser, leaving the day's date at the bottom corner under the letters.

Nyota grins a bit darkly and Jim steps back to examine his work and the doctor asks, "You want 'em to think he did it?"

"That's exactly what I want them to think." He tosses the house's key card inside the mailbox.

Jill smokes her last cigarette out under the ladder, and Alel laughs at Jim coming up behind to pantomime a hugging motion around her shoulder that turns into snatching it out of her lips.

He flicks it onto the kerosene trail that swallows and bursts a blazing line across the graying back yard and spits the first explosion of light that ignites up through the window. There is no one around for miles in the middle of the night, and they watch the golden burn devour the house for only a minute before Jim says, "Let's go."

And they board the ship again, the powering up and rising off of the vessel blowing a wind of dust under them that licks into the cinders of the house leaving its lone life. But the mailbox should live to tell the tale:

_Jim Kirk was here_.


End file.
